Gunjan Singh

Chronicling the India–China Puzzle

China and India are the emerging economies in Asia and are in close geographical proximity to each other. What makes this relationship complicated is the fact that India and China have a disputed boundary and even though the relationship can be regarded as smooth historically, post-1962 the situation took a turn for worse. After a long 14-year gap of absent diplomatic relations after the 1962 war, India and China resumed their diplomatic contacts at the ambassadorial level only in 1976. The general perception of people on both sides has been one of negativity and mistrust towards the other. In addition, the force driving and shaping the formulation of foreign policy and diplomatic agenda has been influenced by heavy nationalism in India as well as China. Bilateral economic interaction between China and India has grown in the last few years. The total trade volume between India and China in 2013 was US

Mass Media in Xi’s China: Markets Versus Control

65.47 billion. There has also been an increase in people-to-people contact, in the form of tourists, entrepreneurs, students and workers who visit and stay for longer durations. Despite this, the interaction between the people of the two countries is not as smooth as one would assume it to be. In fact, it would not be wrong to suggest that despite being neighbours, China and India do not understand each other as much as they should. The recent increase in bilateral exchanges is only making the lack of understanding more apparent. The two books by Pallavi Aiyer and the book by Reshma Patil, under review here, clearly highlight this dilemma. These books can be considered as memoirs or logs of day to day issues and biases which the people of Indian origin come across in China. The three books are spread over a timeframe of 2008–2014. This is the definitive phase of China’s rise and the time when bilateral relations between India and China swung dramatically from the positive to the negative end of the spectrum. The Chinese military started to become more assertive and the number of border incursions (India and China share an undemarcated and unsettled border) increased. At the same time, political and economic

Routledge handbook of Chinese media by Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley

X i Jinping became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China in November 2012 and the President of the People’s Republic of China in March 2013. Ever since, under his leadership as the Chinese President, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been progressively tightening its control over the media. In a Communist structure, the media is perceived to be the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Party and is supposed to be used for propaganda. Media is a very essential tool in spreading the government agenda and controlling the public discourse. In fact, the CCP had established the Department of Propaganda as early as in the year 1920. As David Bandurski put it, ‘press control is an essential element of political life in China and it is also real and immediate.’ Xi has taken the cue from his predecessors and has in fact gone past them to impose new controls over an already tame media in the name of strengthening the ideas of ‘peace and stability’ in Chinese society. In order to promote his idea of the ‘Chinese Dream’, perhaps, he needs to strengthen his position in China by ensuring tighter control over the Party and the government and he finds in the media a useful tool to disseminate his worldview and build popular support. In fact, soon after assuming leadership, Xi initiated a number of new policies, and one of the major steps adopted by him—the massive anticorruption drive, which resulted in the ousting of a number of high-ranking Chinese officials—has been received well by the people. He has also promoted the so-called ‘Mass Line’ to prioritise the interest of the people. His government has also adopted the Anti-terrorism Law and National Security Law. These developments show that Xi is trying to consolidate his position by taking the right steps to attend to popular aspirations and, in the true communist tradition, he has sought to keep the media under control to avoid any possibility of any dissent emerging anywhere to his style of functioning. While he has tried to be pro-people, compared to his predecessors, he may be less charitable about granting necessary freedom to the media. It is useful to focus on Xi’s approach to the media in this context. During the leadership of Hu Jintao, the Chinese media did experience some degree of freedom in reporting and questioning the government’s policies, especially during the Sichuan earthquake and the Zhejiang Railway accident. A close observer of the media scenario in China, Bandurski would say that ‘If the Jiang and Hu-era policies were encapsulated in the four-character phrases “public opinion guidance” and “public opinion channelling” respectively, we might say that Xi Jinping’s policy is encapsulated in the hardline phrase “public opinion struggle.”’ Paradoxically,

China in and Beyond the Headlines

I n the last three decades, the Chinese economy and society have witnessed unprecedented change and development. Since the introduction of the economic reforms in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China has transformed itself from an agrarian, underdeveloped economy to become the second-largest economy in the world, also uplifting its large population out of poverty; 600 million have undergone this transformation. Economic reforms have had a very strong impact on many aspects of Chinese society. One sector which has faced massive change is the Chinese media. The socialist expectation of media is that it plays the role of being the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Communist Party. Chinese media remains highly controlled and monitored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Media freedom is one liberty which the Party still does not dispense. Controlling the media has helped the CCP to sustain itself in power. The Party zealously controls and guards the news domain. However, with economic reforms, the Chinese media has undergone a number of changes, within a master frame where the CCP has full control over what the media can report. The most critical factor in this regard was the introduction of advertisement. When the CCP withdrew subsidies, the media had to generate revenue through advertisement. This meant that the media had to publish and show things which interested the Chinese people, thus moving away from strict conformity to the CCP of the past. The introduction of newer modes of communication like the Internet and mobile phones have also transformed the media landscape as it exists in China today. As per reports, the total number of Internet users in China in June 2014 was 632 million. This information outlet is becoming an important tool in the hands of the Chinese people to look for alternative stories and ideas. The Chinese people today have much more at their disposal for news, information and entertainment than what the Party puts out through its official media organs. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media covers almost all the aspects of media in China. The book is divided into five parts: (I) The development of the study and structure of Chinese media; (II) Journalism, press freedom and social mobilisation; (III) The Internet, public sphere and media culture; (IV) Market, production and media industries; and (V) Chinese media and the world. It comprehensively analyses Chinese media from its historical origins to the current situation. It also covers Strategic Analysis, 2016 Vol. 40, No. 2, 153–155, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2015.1136032

India and China - Neighbours, Strangers by Ira Pande

What do you do to start reading china in and beyond the headlines? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. Its not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this china in and beyond the headlines.

Socialist China, Capitalist China by Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne (eds.)

the end, Mandelbaum’s plan could actually have an adverse effect on regional security, undermining the rationale of his original proposal. Does this mean that the US should abandon its pursuit of alternative energy technology? Surely not. The American economy’s over-reliance on oil is clearly problematic and it makes good policy sense to diversify sources of energy. What is more problematic is Mandelbaum’s decision to make oil independence the crux of a longterm American grand strategy, one which he assumes will have vast geopolitical consequences across Asia. The real value of this book is in its first half, where Mandelbaum effectively outlines the impact of budgetary pressures on America’s capacity to operate beyond its borders. These circumstances will have a clarifying effect, though, forcing the US to become more shrewd in its conduct of world affairs, ‘precluding the kind of errors that carelessness, itself the product of an abundance of power, produced in the first two post-Cold War decades’ (p. 63). This is a welcome development. Due in part to Mandelbaum’s foreign policy focus, however, he completely ignores the root cause of America’s future fiscal problems: the rising cost of health care and dysfunctional social security and medicare systems. This issue will lead to higher budget deficits and will limit America’s ability to project power overseas. This economic stress is domestic in nature, true, but it has little to do with US oil dependence. ∗ Peter R. Maher is a Visiting Fellow at the IDSA, New Delhi.

Hu Jintao: China's Silent Ruler by Kerry Brown

Chapter 5 consists of recommendations and a conclusion based on surveys conducted by the authors. This is really the core of this book. The authors’ conclusion is that there is an enormous amount of support for the peace process. But there is a contradiction in this: if many traders were found to be indifferent to the proposal of a porous border then how they are enthused by the idea on commercial considerations is difficult to understand (p. 40). The findings on both the sides of Kashmir on this issue are interestingly enough identical. This assumption is supported by the detailed survey report given in Chapters 6 and 7. But surprisingly they have not recommended that the two countries need to carry forward the people’s wishes. The study has instead recommended that the United States should facilitate this process of ‘making border irrelevant’ in the interests of peace and stability in south Asia. This only highlights the problem of the deep mistrust that blights the relationship between the two countries. Moreover maintaining peace and stability in south Asia should be the primary responsibility of India and Pakistan. Unless an attempt is made to promote a bilateral relationship based on trust the US will not be able to broker peace in the region. One of the shortcomings of the study is that while the survey by the Indian authors was conducted in all the major regions of Jammu and Kashmir, the survey by the Pakistani authors was limited to ‘Azad’ Kashmir. It did not include Gilgit, Baltistan and Skardu which was a part of the former princely state therefore a party to the Kashmir conflict. But even the Indian authors have not seen fit to survey the people of Leh and Kargil. Like the Kashmir dispute the study remains valley-centric with the only distinction that for the first time the opinion of the people of ‘Azad’ Kashmir is included in the Kashmir debate.