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A central processing unit (CPU) semiconductor chip is displayed among flags of China and U.S., February 17, 2023.
What We're Watching: US-China tech race, Ukraine-Russia confusion, Greek train politics, world's most populous "country"
Who's winning the US-China tech race?
China is now ahead of the US in 37 out of 44 types of advanced technology, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. These include artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and robotics — all key to winning the race to dominate global tech. Beijing is finally reaping the benefits of decades and vast sums of money invested in scientific research, a priority for Xi Jinping. So, can China declare victory? Not so fast. The study points out that it’s not easy to turn cutting-edge research milestones into manufacturing prowess. In other words, the Chinese might have acquired the technology to make the most advanced quantum computers in the world, but the country still lacks the capacity to mass-produce them at the same quality standards as less powerful American-made models (this applies, for instance, to semiconductors). For now, at least, China is not yet eating America's tech lunch.
Fatal attack in Russia: whodunit?
Kyiv and the Kremlin are trading accusations after an apparent attack in the Western Russian province of Bryansk, which the local governor says killed two civilians and wounded a child. President Putin blamed the attack on Ukrainian “terrorists,” but Ukraine denies responsibility and points out that a Russian anti-Kremlin group calling itself the “Russian Volunteer Corps” has in fact claimed responsibility. Little is known about this group, and some have wondered whether the attack might even be a false flag operation by Russia to escalate the war. The Bryansk attack follows a series of Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia earlier this week, which exposed weaknesses in the Kremlin’s air defenses. Should the paramilitary group have acted alone, the raid would underscore the volatility of the conflict and the potential for any violent acts to escalate the chaos. We’ll be watching to see whether the saboteurs were part of a government plot or a paramilitary attack.
Greek train tragedy gets political
Days after Greece experienced the worst train crash in its history, recriminations are already flying. In Athens, protesters hurled stones at the offices of the state railway company in anger over the deaths of at least 57 people killed when a passenger train collided with a freight train on Tuesday. Ahead of national elections this spring, the crash has put Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki on the defensive because of a series of reports about Greece’s decrepit transport infrastructure. Greece’s state railway system has come under scrutiny in recent years, largely due to its poor safety record (it had the highest fatality rate of 29 countries examined in 2022 by the European Union). But speaking of the EU, the plot thickens: Some analysts say Greece’s neglect of its rail infrastructure is at least partly due to the austerity measures that Athens was forced to impose in 2009 in exchange for bailouts from the EU and other international creditors.
The UN "recognizes" a fictional country
Ever heard of the United States of Kailasa? Probably not, mainly because ... it doesn't exist. But that didn’t stop UN officials from allowing reps from the fictional country to attend two UN meetings in Geneva. Kailasa was "founded" in 2019 by Nithyananda, a self-styled guru who fled his native India over charges of sexual assault and rape and bought an island off the coast of Ecuador. He named it Kailasa after the Himalayan mountain home of Shiva, a Hindu god. Ecuador's government denies ceding its sovereign territory to anyone, guru or not, and the UN now says it'll ignore future requests by anyone representing Kailasa to show up at events. Undaunted, the country’s “official” website still claims that the US recognizes it (it does not) and, our favorite, that Kailasa’s population is nearly twice as large as India’s.Indian army officers and troops at a forward base in eastern Ladakh.
In the world’s highest battlefield, China has the advantage over India
Fresh clashes in a culturally and strategically important area in the Himalayas between the world’s two largest militaries are triggering questions about India’s capacity to confront China.
The point of contention is the Line of Actual Control, a 2,150-mile British-era border militarized in 1962 in the wake of a brief war after which China gained 14,700 square miles of what India still considers its territory. Sixty years later, a more muscular Beijing has returned to reclaim what it still contends as its own: vast swaths of northern India’s Ladakh region and most of Arunachal Pradesh state. Meanwhile, India is still pushing to take back China’s Aksai Chin region.
For decades, this sparsely populated area remained a quiet frontier, until in June 2020 a rare bloody skirmish left 20 Indian soldiers and 4 People’s Liberation Army troops dead. Dozens of rounds of negotiations resulted in China getting a buffer zone and India losing a foothold in areas it previously controlled.
The optics indicated that India lost and China won.
Now, the latest clashes have rung three alarms. First, the front has shifted to the east, near Tibet, which means that the tensions are spreading. Second, India hasn’t matched China’s massive buildup of military and civilian infrastructure in the remote area, which means it has to play catch-up.
Third, and most importantly, none of India’s moves to counter China since 2020 — to punish Beijing economically by banning certain imports and apps, to align its diplomacy with the Western-led anti-China bloc, or balancing with China’s friend Russia – have worked.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is under fire at home. Though the opposition is weak, it smells blood in the water and is questioning Modi’s capacity to deter China. The PM, who is gearing up for a third term, has swatted off irritants like Pakistan and gained popular support for his strongman confidence.
But the PLA is not the Pakistani army. And despite New Delhi’s decades-old policy of non-alignment aka strategic autonomy — where it tells the West that it’s a friend, not a lover, always a partner, and not an ally — the Chinese don’t seem convinced that the Indians can be dealt with without boots on the ground.
So far, India is putting up a brave face. On Thursday, it went ahead with a pre-scheduled missile test termed a “China Killer” by Indian media. And last month, Indian troops held joint exercises with the US near the border with China, despite objections from Beijing.
Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, thinks that India presently has limited if any capacity to deter China’s border provocations. What’s more, the Indians can’t really count on outside help beyond public messages of support and at the most some intelligence from Washington.
“At the end of the day, India is on its own,” he explains, “though that’s partly by design, as India prefers that its Western partners not say so much publicly during these clashes so as not to further provoke Beijing.”
But New Delhi urgently needs to do some military housekeeping. Kugelman thinks that India will need to play a long game and continue to focus on military modernization efforts and reforms within its massive but lethargic defense industry, so that it can develop a stronger deterrent capacity further down the road.
Of course, that won’t accomplish much now with China literally on India’s doorstep, he assesses.
China-India tensions also pose an awkward challenge for Washington. For decades, New Delhi has looked to Moscow as a key source of weaponry meant to deter Beijing. India’s Russian-made arsenal missile systems could trigger American sanctions over Ukraine.
“If the US wants India to wean itself off Russian arms, that could undercut both Indian and US interests,” Kugelman explains. But there is a middle ground. America, along with allies that are also Indian suppliers like France or Israel, “will need to step up their game and offer more of their weaponry to replace what India has long received from Russia.”
On the economic front, shutting off China isn’t going to be easy. While tensions have forced the Indians into fresh trade deals with Western powers in lieu of China, “if you look at India’s recent trade figures, you’ll find that China continues to be a top Indian trade partner,” Kugelman says.
“Commercial cooperation with Beijing dies hard.”
Indian soldiers deployed in the Ladakh region bordering China.
The hedge edge: India’s savvy but selfish non-aligned diplomacy
After facing off in the western Himalayas for over two years, with more than 100,000 troops deployed in what is considered the world’s highest battlefield, the Chinese and Indian militaries are finally disengaging.
The latest breakthrough, announced Thursday, comes after 16 rounds of negotiations conducted since June 2020, when some 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese troops were killed in a rare bloody skirmish. This was the worst fighting between the two sides there since a 1962 border war won by China and strained ties between Beijing and Delhi.
But while the Indians continue to negotiate with the Chinese, what does this mean for India’s perceived position as a natural “counterweight” to China? Indeed, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Delhi has bolstered its relationship with Moscow, Beijing’s new partner “without limits.” Are the Indians in fact trying to play all sides by moving closer to the China-Russia axis while staying a US strategic partner?
Not so fast. It ain’t over yet as far as military tensions go.
According to the Indians, the latest development involves the Chinese backing off from Gorga-Hotsprings, their least invasive “encroachment” that Delhi claims Beijing’s troops made in 2020. Larger tracts of territory — including the Depsang Plateau, which India claims — still have Chinese boots on the ground. Both sides have enough personnel and military hardware in the region to still argue they’re on war footing.
“I won’t say that the standoff is resolved yet,” says Akriti Vasudeva, a fellow at the Stimson Center’s South Asia Program. “Disengagement is just removing the frontline troops from their eyeball-to-eyeball-positions with each other to an agreed-upon distance back.”
What’s more, neither the Chinese nor the Indians have actually left the area or packed up their gear. And not a word yet on when the troops will return to their peacetime positions along the Actual Line of Control, the region's de-facto but disputed border.
For Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, the peace is unlikely to hold given that China fundamentally disagrees with the Indian position on the border. Moreover, he expects incursions to continue because it’s essentially been written out: in October 2021 Beijing passed a new border law encouraging both the military and civilians to assert Chinese sovereignty in disputed areas.
So, what triggered the latest thaw? For one thing, events that are around the corner. China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s PM Narendra Modi are scheduled to meet this week in Uzbekistan, where both will be attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, a multilateral franchise of decades of diplomatic coordination between Moscow and Beijing, which India joined in 2017.
As the relationship between Beijing and Delhi hasn’t exactly been warm for a while, Xi and Modi probably “want to demonstrate that they are able to resolve issues,” says Raffaelo Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
For another, perhaps they’ve just gotten weary of the harshness of mountain warfare.
The agreement could well “just be the natural outcome of a long negotiation period at a time where India and China were both finding it hard to sustain their troop deployments in the Ladakh area, especially with winter approaching soon,” Vasudeva explains.
More importantly, the Himalayan deal is the most recent example of India’s fluid approach to diplomacy. Delhi’s policy of “strategic autonomy” – which follows decades of official non-alignment – allows India to adopt a pick-and-choose framework of diplomacy, hopping in and out of understandings with partners and friends depending on India’s evolving interests.
For instance, as it continued an advanced maritime security dialogue with the US last week, Indian troops joined the Russian and Chinese military in exercises in Russia’s far east, despite American concerns. The same week, while Delhi pulled out of the US-led Indo-Pacific Economy Framework, it planned its own bilateral trade-policy forum with the Americans.
This “your thing, our way” code of doing business cuts across the board. While India is a member of the Quad dialogue alongside Australia, Japan and the US, it remains engaged with Russia and China on the diplomatic, trade, and even defense fronts.
Modi buys Russian oil, yet hangs out regularly with the G7 gang. Even now that they've reached the disengagement agreement with Beijing, the Indians are planning on conducting joint drills with US forces near the disputed Himalayan territory.
For India, the policy works because it keeps competitors on their toes, and entices partners to keep courting India and even fighting for its business. But for those who are counting on India to be a dependable partner, even an ally, and a counterweight to China, the gates of New Delhi aren’t exactly wide open.
Pantucci sees two major holes in the argument that India is a natural counterweight to China.
First, “they have lots of problems at home that cause issues with the Western powers. These are pressures of democracy.” Second, he says, “the truth is that the Indians always wanted to hedge and put themselves in a more non-aligned space than any kind of bloc against somebody else.”
But the recent disengagement doesn’t change the fundamental reality that Delhi considers China as a strategic threat. In fact, Vasudeva points out, “the 2020 standoff further reinforced the thinking in Delhi that whatever India has done in the last few years to accommodate China … has not helped and China has continued to undermine Indian interests.”
India, she adds, no longer believes it can improve its relationship with China for the better. As far as Delhi is concerned, all that can be done is to manage the relationship so it doesn’t get worse.
What We're Watching: Few Iraqis vote, Czech Republic in crisis, China-India talks crash again
Iraq's dud of an election: Just 41 percent of eligible Iraqi voters showed up at the polls this weekend, the lowest turnout in the post-Saddam Hussein era. Lack of enthusiasm for the vote – the first since mass protests in 2019 over political corruption and economic stagnation prompted a fierce crackdown – shows the depths of popular dissatisfaction with the political elite. The election came as Iraq grapples with crumbling infrastructure, a moribund economy, and ongoing sectarian strife among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish players, with Iran meddling on behalf of the Shia groups. Preliminary results show that no candidate is on a path to win a clear majority, meaning that negotiations to choose a PM tasked with forming a government could take weeks or even months. Gulf countries and the US are hoping for a moderate who can ensure the stability of Iraq and challenge Iran's clout in the region. Iraq's current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, in some ways fits the bill, having played a key role in mediating negotiations between longtime rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Is the Czech Republic headed for a constitutional crisis? The country's billionaire populist prime minister Andrej Babiš suffered a shock defeat in elections over the weekend, edged out by a center-right "Together" coalition that agrees on little beyond the need to defeat him. But the plot thickens! The Together bloc has announced it will seek to form a government with a center-left opposition group led by the Czech Pirate party, but they can't do so officially unless they are asked to by Czech President Miloš Zeman, a staunch Babiš ally who was taken to a hospital over the weekend and remains in intensive care. Zeman said before the vote that he'd ask the party that won the most votes to form a government. That's Babiš' party, which was beaten only by a coalition of parties. It's not clear what happens next. If Zeman is out of the picture, the post-election responsibilities would fall to the speaker of parliament, but he's a member of Babiš' party too. With the current legislature's mandate set to expire in just ten days, the Czech Republic's relatively young democracy is now at risk of a serious constitutional crisis.
China-India high-altitude talks crash again: For more than a year now, China and India have been locked in a tense border standoff high in the Himalayas. The two sides even came to blows last summer; hand-to-hand combat between border guards left 20 Indians and four Chinese dead. Now each side maintains thousands of heavily armed troops, backed by artillery and air power, along the boundary. Over the weekend, commanders from each side met – for the 13th time – to hash out an agreement on who controls what. But each side accused the other of being intransigent and, for the second winter in a row, Asia's two giants will keep their forces in areas where the temperature regularly drops to -30 degrees Celsius. A new "cold war" in Asia?
What’s going on between India and China?
This week's skirmishes between Indian and Chinese forces in a disputed Himalayan border area represent the deadliest flare up between the two regional powers in many decades.
The two foes have been locked in a bitter border dispute for years, yet recurrent flare-ups have tended to be resolved through diplomacy. The spark that ignited the clashes this time seems to be a recent Indian infrastructure development, including a road to a remote Indian army base which New Delhi argues falls on its side of the Line of Control.
Though details remain murky, after the last rock was thrown Tuesday, at least 20 Indian troops were dead, while the People's Liberation Army also reported some "casualties" on its side, but stayed mum on the numbers.
How did we get here? India and China, the world's two most populous states and two great powers in Asia, have long viewed the other cautiously. Since China thrashed India's army in a border war in 1962, the two rivals have enjoyed a cold peace for the most part. But as Beijing and New Delhi have continued to compete for influence on many fronts across South Asia, the two nuclear powers are more often bumping up against one another in the remote borderlands, as well as elsewhere in South Asia.
The power of personality. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, first elected in 2014, India has tried to project a muscular nationalism at home and abroad. As part of this strategy, Modi has stoked national pride by talking tough on longtime rival Pakistan, which has cozied up to Beijing in recent years. (China, for its part, has endeared itself to Islamabad by pledging a whopping $60 billion to build the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor — a network of roads, pipelines and a crucial port.)
In asserting an expanded regional role for his country, Modi has made clear to China's leaders that there are limits to India's willingness to resolve ongoing conflict through peaceful negotiation. Consider that last year, after protracted skirmishes broke out in the contested western Himalayas in 2017, Modi moved unilaterally to carve out a chunk of Kashmir long contested by India, Pakistan, and China, placing it under direct rule from New Delhi. Unsurprisingly, this move irked Beijing, which said that it undermined its territorial sovereignty. Increasingly wary about China's dominance on its doorstep – in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – Modi signed a $3.5 billion arms deal earlier this year with the United States, a useful ally against Beijing.
Recent clashes also come as China has doubled down on its own territorial ambitions across Asia. Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has stoked national pride in China's expanded military and economic influence and declared a "new era" for China's role in the world. This is part of what he has called the "great rejuvenation" of the Chinese state.
In recent months, as international attention has focused squarely on COVID-19, Beijing has gotten bolder, clamping down on Hong Kong's autonomy and clashing with Indonesian, Malaysian, and Vietnamese vessels in the disputed South China Sea – and probing Indian lines in the Himalayas, which led to this week's clashes.
No one wants an escalation. Both sides say they are keen to deescalate the situation, since this confrontation comes with costs and risks for both sides. But neither government wants to appear to be the first to back down, and a meeting between military officials on Wednesday failed to break the border standoff. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Modi warned that the death of scores of Indian forces "will not be in vain."