Latest news with #MaoZedong
Indian Express
13 hours ago
- Business
- Indian Express
Ram Madhav writes: India and the new world order
Eurasia is in turmoil. Three major conflicts — Russia-Ukraine, Israel's Gaza operations and the Israel-Iran-US conflict — are reshaping the geopolitics of the region. Wars don't just cause physical destruction, they profoundly impact international relations. Beyond Eurasia, US President Donald Trump is causing serious drift and disorder in the Western world. The US and Western Europe, powerhouses of the last century, appear to be decisively moving into a slow afternoon. At the same time, the world is witnessing the unmissable rise of China as a dominant economic and technological superpower. These developments, coupled with a few other important ones, will lead to the emergence of a new global order. Therein lies a major challenge for India. It developed institutions and initiatives based on the premises of the old world. But the emerging order calls for a new way of thinking about its geostrategic priorities. During the ill-fated Cultural Revolution years in China, Chairman Mao Zedong used to call for the abolition of the 'Four Olds' — old ideology, old culture, old habits and old customs. This might be a wrong analogy, but India, too, needs to come out of the mindset of the last century. India has built a strong partnership with Europe over the past few decades. In recent years, the Narendra Modi government has successfully enhanced engagement with Middle Eastern powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Out of those engagements emerged the ambitious India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) initiative. IMEC is a promising initiative connecting South Asia with the GCC region and Europe. Signed in September 2023 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi, IMEC became the flavour of the season for many strategic pundits and fodder for think tanks. However, given the changed geopolitical scenario in Eurasia, India needs to recalibrate IMEC carefully. Although a beneficial project, it faces daunting challenges, the cauldron in Eurasia being the major one. With stability eluding the region, IMEC's future, too, remains ambiguous. At a more fundamental level, the positioning of IMEC itself has been flawed. Most commentaries seek to pit it against China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Confusing the geo-economic with the geo-strategic is one of the old-school traits that many in India fail to overcome. It must be remembered that almost all the member countries of the GCC are partners in the BRI while at least 17 out of 27 EU member countries have closer trade ties with China. Only Italy decided to quit the BRI recently while the rest continue to enjoy Chinese largesse. There is IMEC-related romanticism too, with some scholars overemphasising the millennia-old history when India traded with Europe through ports in the Gulf. It is a fact that India traded in spices and textiles with Europe in return for gold in the good old days — so much so that scholars in Rome used to bitterly complain to their emperor that India was draining all the gold from their kingdom. But today's reality is different. Oman, whose ports were an important part of the route in ancient times, is not even part of IMEC. Then there is the logistics nightmare. In the IMEC scheme, goods from India will reach Middle Eastern ports like Jebel Ali (Dubai) by sea lines. From there, they will be transported through the land route to Haifa in Israel. Beyond Haifa, it will again be a journey through the sea lines to European ports like Marseille in France and Trieste in Italy. Some argue that it bypasses the Suez Canal and thus helps save time and money for the exports. This is contestable. Seventy-five ships pass through the Suez Canal every day in normal times. Each carries a minimum load of 1,00,000 tonnes. If the Suez needs to be bypassed, it requires massive rail infrastructure through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. One has to look at the numbers just to understand the magnitude of the challenge. A single reasonably long freight train can carry 5,500 tonnes of goods. That means for every ship diverting to the Middle East, we need a minimum of 18.5 trains to carry that load to Israel. One can easily calculate the number of trains required and the time this would consume if even a fraction of the ships decide to junk Suez and take this route. Moreover, countries on the land route like Jordan and Egypt are still not part of IMEC. Undoubtedly, beyond these nightmarish challenges lies the opportunity of the $18 trillion economy of the EU that India can explore. But it must also be kept in mind that the EU's GDP growth is sluggish at around 1 per cent, and China is already a big presence in the EU market with a more than 55 per cent share in the manufactured goods sector and a significantly growing share in other key sectors. That leaves less scope for India to penetrate. India has a history of such projects. Long before venturing into the IMEC initiative, in 2000, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government announced the North-South corridor project with much fanfare. It was duly signed by India, Russia and Iran in 2003. Two decades later, while the project remained on paper for India, China quickly entered and built formidable ties with the two countries. Similarly, we talked about a Look East policy in the 1990s, seeking to build strong ties with the roaring Asian Tigers. It became the Act East policy under PM Modi. Yet our engagement with a region that became a free trade partner in 2010, and a comprehensive strategic partner in 2022, remained below par. While India's trade with ASEAN remains at $120 billion, China's trade is touching $1 trillion and growing rapidly. Besides IMEC, Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and ASEAN are important regions for India's geostrategic objectives. It is time India reconfigured its global engagements, going beyond old-world romanticism and Cold War calculations, and followed a multidirectional approach with specific end goals. The writer, president, India Foundation, is with the BJP. Views are personal
The Print
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Print
Why 1969 USSR-China conflict has crucial lessons for Iran & Israel
Few underlying questions, though, have been resolved by the ceasefire. Experts who have studied the bomb damage to Iran's key nuclear facilities at Fordow and Isfahan have concluded the strikes left some key infrastructure untouched . Even more important, the country's stockpile of enriched uranium is intact, they claim. The tenuous ceasefire between Iran and Israel—imposed, in part, by a verbal bunker-busting bomb dropped by President Donald Trump—has brought some calm to a region increasingly concerned by the prospect of a protracted, destabilising conflict, and a world terrified by the prospect of more economic dislocation. Far from the ochre-red walls of his home in the Zhongnanhai, the willow-wreathed secret garden where his imperial predecessors had once begun their mornings with cold swallows-nest soup, Mao Zedong knew the hammer of the Soviet Union was rising—threatening to crack his regime open like an egg. Twenty-seven to 34 divisions of Soviet troops had collected along the border with China in the autumn of 1969, comprising some 270,000 to 290,000 men backed by tanks, artillery, helicopters and more. Missiles, armed with 500 kiloton nuclear warheads, lurked near the shores of Lake Baikal. The United States' intelligence community assesses that Iran has not yet made the political decision to build a nuclear bomb—and is at least a year away from having the technology to develop one. But there's no telling if or when Israel might determine that its existential security justifies further attacks. There's no telling, either, if Iran might one day decide it needs nuclear weapons. The incentives for Iran to acquire one are significant. Facing severe international sanctions since 1979, it has been denied technologies to modernise its armed forces or even protect its own airspace. A weapon capable of destroying entire cities is a persuasive argument. In 1965, the USSR and China—one with an arsenal capable of annihilating the world, the other with a crude inventory that might not have survived an enemy first strike—considered remarkably similar issues. Generals on both sides considered the prophecy made by Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamato, as he planned the brilliant attack that almost brought the US Navy to its knees in 1941: 'For the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.' The end of a romance Like Iran and Israel, which once cooperated on a guided missile programme, shared intelligence on adversaries, and established a strong diplomatic relationship, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China entered the post-Second World War era as intimate allies, with large-scale loans for development projects and engineering support. In 1957, Moscow committed to providing China with a prototype atomic weapon, as well as equipment to enrich uranium hexafluoride—the building block of weapons-grade fissile material. This kind of cooperation was not uncommon during the Cold War: As scholar Mustafa Kibaroglu points out, the US trained a cadre of nuclear engineers in Iran, while France and Germany sold Iran uranium enrichment technologies. Visiting Moscow in 1949, Mao called for 'ten thousand years of friendship and teamwork.' Later, in 1950, the two countries signed a treaty of friendship, alliance and mutual assistance. Although the Soviet Union declined to commit aircraft to support the People's Republic's one-million-strong army in North Korea, it proved generous in providing both industrial and military assistance. From 1954, though, the Soviet-Chinese relationship began to experience severe strains. The dispute was, among other things, an argument between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Mao over the legacy of the tyrant Joseph Stalin. China, however, also saw that a re-industrialising USSR was seeking to repair its relationship with the West. Then, in 1959, the Soviet Union pulled the plug on its nuclear cooperation with China, as it began negotiations on a nuclear-weapons test ban treaty. Moreover, all Soviet personnel were withdrawn from China the next year – a devastating blow to the country's nuclear and military programmes. Also read: Iran is learning the hard way that being a nuclear threshold state isn't safe anymore Toward war Like so many crises, the killing began over nothing, in the middle of nowhere. For over a hundred years, People's Liberation Army troops stationed in Southeast China had looked across the Ussuri River, knowing that the lands of Khabarovsk and Primorsky Krai had once been theirs. The Treaty of Peking, signed in 1860, established the eastern border of China and Imperial Russia along the Ussuri and Amur rivers, as part of a carve-up of lands imposed jointly with the United Kingdom and France. Weakened by war, Qing China had no choice but to accept iniquitous terms. From 1968 to 1969, former Soviet military commander Yuri Babansky later recalled, PLA troops began to intrude into the ice-covered Damansky Island, armed with axes, bats, and sometimes guns. Like on the Line of Actual Control, these skirmishes involved no gunfire. But things escalated rapidly. The first battle deaths came in January 1968, when five PLA soldiers were killed by Soviet troops, in one of the hand-to-hand skirmishes. Then, in December 1968 and February 1969, nine separate clashes broke out, which saw warning gunshots fired for the first time. Early on the morning of 2 March 1969, PLA troops arrived on the island and dug foxholes. Later that day, as a Soviet patrol passed by, some 300 PLA soldiers emerged from their defences and opened fire. Although the PLA was pushed back, even more severe fighting broke out on 15 March. This time, scholar Michael Gerson records, over 2,000 PLA troops were confronted by Soviet forces backed by the brand-new T62 tank, artillery and air power. The Soviet Union's efforts to defuse the crisis were rejected. Premier Alexei Kosygin, Gerson writes, attempted to call Mao on a direct telephone line that had been set up between the former allies. The Chinese operator, however, refused to connect the call, calling Kosygin a 'revisionist element' before hanging up. Also read: Iran's brutal regime is facing a reckoning. Consequences of US attack will go beyond Tehran The nuclear threat From declassified documentation, it's clear the Soviets seriously considered settling the problem through nuclear means. At a meeting at the Beef and Bird Restaurant in Washington, DC, on 18 August 1969, Soviet diplomat Boris Davydov asked his counterpart, William Stearman, 'point blank what the US would do if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China's nuclear facilities.' The US, historians William Burr and Jeffrey Richelson have recorded, had made the same proposal to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1960—and hoped it might still be on the table. Less than a week earlier, though, the eminent scholar Allen Whiting had met with President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and made the argument that Soviet-China tensions offered the US an opportunity to split the bloc. Whiting's paper, now declassified, led the United States to reach out to Mao through various channels, seeing if there could be a diplomatic opening. There was, however, no consensus in the US Government at this stage. Former Central Intelligence Agency officer William Hyland, for example, argued in a top-secret paper that a limited China-Soviet war, ending with the destruction of China's nuclear weapons, would be in the best interests of the United States. Finally, the United States chose to remain neutral in the spiralling crisis. The CIA estimated, Gerson writes, that the PLA had fewer than 10 single-stage, liquid-fueled DF-2 medium-range ballistic missiles and a handful of strategic bombers. This force, according to the CIA, could be wiped out in a Soviet first strike. To Soviet strategists, though, there was a more complex threat. Ever since the Korean War, China had learned that its vast geographical mass and gargantuan population constituted a powerful deterrent. Even though Soviet Defence Minister Andrei Grechko argued for multi-megaton assaults on the PLA, his colleagues feared that China would absorb the losses and then attack Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, and Khabarovsk, as well as crucial nodes of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. That would bring war inside the Soviet Union itself. For their part, however, China's leaders became increasingly concerned that the Soviet Union was prepared to carry out its threats. Lin Biao, the marshal of the PLA, and Mao, now authorised talks to defuse tensions. The two men, Gerson records, were terrified as Premier Alexei Kosygin's plane arrived in Beijing, fearing it might house special forces or even a nuclear weapon. The lessons of the crisis for the Iran-Israel war are many and profound. For one, China learned that a nation with a fledgling nuclear arsenal could not hope to deter a significant power. The weapons were good for show, but little else. For its part, the Soviet Union feared becoming mired in a war without end. The annihilation of its enemy was inevitable, but would come with costs that just weren't worth paying. For its part, the US would capitalise on the schism between China and the Soviets, with Kissinger making his now-famous secret visit to Beijing in 1971. That would unleash a series of events, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China as a peer competitor to the US itself. The most important lesson, though, is the simplest one: not all problems can be solved by bombing. In 1969, both China and the USSR learned they were risking catastrophic outcomes for marginal gains. That's a lesson Iran and Israel should be considering with great care. Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal. (Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
ABC News
4 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Mass murder, cannibalism and insanity — inside Mao's cultural revolution
In 1966, the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong went to war against his own government. What followed was ten years of murderous violence and utter insanity, until Mao's death in 1976. Children were urged to denounce their parents, teachers were beaten to death in front of howling mobs, youths were 're-educated', the economy was ruined, and so much of the precious cultural heritage of a great, ancient society went up in smoke. The 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' left such deep scars on China, that subsequent leaders have tried to bury its memory. But, still some young Chinese people — 'Neo-Moaists' — have a sense of nostalgia for the violent revolution they didn't even live through. In order to understand what's going on in China today, you need to know what happened in those strange and terrifying years, and how it affected President Xi Zinping, who had a front row seat to the terror. Further information Bombard the Headquarters is published by Black Inc. Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.
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Business Standard
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
Women see reversal of China's one-child policy as more state pressure
Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China Published by Bloomsbury 320 pages ₹599 For anyone trying to understand China behind the headlines and the propaganda, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China is an important read. It provides a people's perspective of how Chinese society has evolved since economic reform and the manner in which the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have impacted Chinese women in particular. The book is an attempt to present the story and idea of China beyond the CCP and through the lens of the Chinese people. The word revolution is also aptly used in the title underscoring how the word can mean different things to different sections of society and the Party. According to the author, 'This book is about revolutions in two senses. It is about China's economic revolution from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, after the Reform and Opening Up era…. It is also about the personal revolutions undertaken by four young women born in those decades as they came of age amid the inconsistent rise — and now stumble — of social mobility in China's capitalist era'. Women pay the highest price in any revolution and China is no different. Though Mao Zedong did famously proclaim, 'Women hold up half the sky', Chinese society does not reflect this outlook in any meaningful way. China is inherently patriarchal; for proof, one need look no further than the gender composition of the Chinese Politburo Standing Committee. Even initiatives such as the 'One-Child Policy' have been aimed at directing and controlling women's agency over their bodies. This coupled with the preference for a male child has consistently aggravated the intensity of inequality within Chinese society. The modification of the one-child policy to a two-child policy in 2016 and to a three-child policy in 2021 directly impacts the lives of Chinese women. These changes were driven primarily because of decreasing birth rates. She describes how Chinese women responded: 'Rather than being seen as a permission to have more children, everyone saw it as a sign of looming government pressure on women to rescue the country's plummeting birth rate'. There is no denying that Chinese society has seen enormous changes since economic reform. Large swathes of the population were lifted out of poverty, compulsory primary education ensured a high degree of literacy, urbanisation has been swift, and the country is an economic and military powerhouse. What gets lost in this big upbeat picture is the people. How have their lives been impacted? Can data be the only measure of success? For instance, the author shrewdly offers a take on how Chinese women approach the issue of using make-up. She highlights how using makeup is linked to the notions of being feudal and the 'fact that the party had later denounced wearing makeup as a bourgeois fashion'. But equally, a decision to apply makeup can also be considered revolutionary. The book skilfully juxtaposes the lives of four 'ordinary' women since their birth to their adult lives. It also paints a picture of how the policies adopted and implemented by the Party impacts each one of them differently and yet similarly, and underscores why the major challenges that the Chinese society faces today cannot be addressed by top-down policy changes. These policies primarily represent what the Party needs at any given point of time to survive and gain legitimacy. But these policies have also failed to address the real challenges. What China needs is a major revisit of the hukou system, the healthcare system, the insurance system, and child care and education system. The book details that, 'by the mid-2010s, government figures suggested that there were 13 million people without any kind of hukou, of whom 8 million had been children outside their parents' birth quotas'. It also highlights the challenges migrant workers face today, the same workers who have played a crucial role in China's economic revolution. This is not just a book about four lives; it is about how these women adapt to the changes around them. How they try to understand the lives of their parents and their children while understanding themselves. How they all define a purpose for themselves while making the most of the limitations and challenges. The book also shows how feudal, Marxist and capitalist structures coexist in China today. It provides a nuanced and novel context for what is a revolution in today's China. And that can be a small decision, something as simple as expressing your own opinions and deciding what kind of life you want to live. The reviewer is associate professor, O P Jindal Global University
Wall Street Journal
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: ‘The Red Wind Howls' by Tsering Döndrup
Censored in China, Tsering Döndrup's vivid and excoriating 'The Red Wind Howls' recounts the decadeslong Communist clampdown in Amdo, a multiethnic region of northeastern Tibet roughly the size of France. The story begins in the late 1950s, immediately after the civilian massacres perpetrated by the People's Liberation Army during what has come to be known as the Amdo uprising but which the characters in this novel call simply the Harrowing Day. It ends with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, by which time Tibetan society has not been transformed so much as nearly eliminated. Mr. Döndrup, who writes in Tibetan, divides the novel into two parts. The first follows the 10-year sentence being served by the lama Alak Drong at a brutal re-education camp alongside other so-called class enemies from the clans of nomadic Tibetan Buddhists. The second part chronicles the fate of the camp's survivors during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when all traditional customs are violently proscribed and the people are brought to starvation by the government requirement that they plant crops that cannot grow in Amdo's mountainous altitude. In an acid-etched translation by Christopher Peacock, the whole book is memorable, but it is the first section that makes 'The Red Wind Howls' a contemporary world-literature classic. With the vigorous anger and precise detail that calls to mind Varlam Shalamov's remembrances of life in the Siberian Gulag, Mr. Döndrup depicts the horrors of the Chinese prison camp: the struggle sessions, the culture of 'backstabbing and informing,' the ritualized torture and the many other daily punishments and deprivations that turn even the strongest prisoners into mindless 'labor machines.' As in all totalitarian regimes, the rules imposed by the party cadres are Kafkaesque in their absurdity. For instance, suicide is commonplace among the prisoners, but because it is outlawed in Buddhism the nomads succumb to it far less. This fact is marshaled as evidence of their lingering religious faith, and for the crime of not killing themselves they are re-educated even more harshly.
