This paper provides conceptual and practical aspects of military diplomacy. It examines India’s recent efforts in enhancing its military diplomacy vis-àvis Chinese military diplomacy conundrum in Asia, especially in South and Southeast Asia. It points out that India’s inability to evince trust and goodwill with its neighbours has led to most of them preferring to employ military diplomacy with China as an India-specific countervailing factor. It argues that India’s military diplomacy is yet to catch up with its rising power status.
It is not very often in India, that comes across a book about China that goes beyond the traditional subject of India-China relations. Jagannath P. Panda’s book China’s Path to Power: Party, Military and the Politics of State Transition does exactly that.
The conflict over rare earths is not only a consequence of the monopoly amassed by China but is also reflective of the current flux in global power hierarchies.
China has all along been testing the limits of India’s tolerance and restraint and has once again given the Indian foreign ministry much home work for the next few months.
Wen Jiabao’s visit provides ground to bring better clarity on the Chinese stance over a range of critical issues to India, and to ask whether the sentiments expressed in 2005 were merely rhetorical.
China’s objection to the early release of a UN report on North Korea’s compliance with UN sanctions stemmed from its misplaced confidence in international diplomacy.
Thousands of aviation enthusiasts and professionals are bound to throng to Zhuhai on 16 November, but one wonders if Indian aviation companies and other SMEs would send their delegations or sell their wares at the show.
The latest addition to the Chinese ‘enigma’ is its oil potential. There have been various accounts, of late, in influential journals and important documents attempting to unravel the mystery surrounding Chinese oil. As it happens, most of them have helped only to further deepen it.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden visited Beijing on October 16 – 21 to discuss cooperation in manned space flight. While one swallow does not make a summer, it may signal that the US may be considering greater engagement with China in outer space, particularly manned flight.
