Budget made for capital expenditure must increase if India is to keep pace with China’s rising military might. India’s tumultuous and volatile strategic environment showed no signs of abating in intensity. New Delhi continues to face a two-front challenge from both of its primary foes, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Pakistan, notwithstanding the latter’s recent conciliatory overtures, which are only a smokescreen to tide over its dire economic vulnerabilities.
The global cleavage on climate change is essentially between those that have grown rich enough to be climate-resilient and those that are not. The way to bridge this gap is not to set up any Loss and Damage Fund, but to spend any money that the rich countries have to spare on sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere.
The Chinese approach gels rather well with the Arab World’s ‘Act East Policy’.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major challenge for China, with unprecedented lockdowns and occasional horror stories of the origins and spread of COVID-19 and how it has been dealt with, leading to nationwide protests which have been partially successful in achieving the winding down of excessive COVID-19 restrictions. President Xi Jinping, emboldened after being crowned the third time by the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), did have the taste of people’s ire and his limitations as the Chinese economy was also being hurt and a downward trend was being noticed.
To say that the year 2022 has been a tumultuous one would be an understatement. Even as the year comes to an end, Russia continues with its bombardment of Ukrainian cities, targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. The world’s second most powerful nation, China, is facing multiple pressures. In a matter of days, the Chinese Communist Party reversed its zero Covid policy as it came under pressure from the wider public that was tired of Xi Jinping’s strict Covid measures.
With tensions between an aggressive China and an emerging India intensifying, there will be significant changes and challenges in the Indian Ocean and South Asian regions. As 2022 comes to an end, the world is embracing a ‘new normal’ where new fault lines are being reconfigured in the Indo-Pacific.
Recent clashes between Indian and Chinese soldiers along the Line of Actual Control, or LAC, have once again underscored how a 20th-century conflict continues to shape the 21st-century trajectory of Sino-Indian relations and constrain New Delhi’s aspirations to play a larger role on the global stage. The Galwan Valley crisis of 2020 made it clear that Beijing had no intention of diplomatically resolving its border dispute with India. It also pushed Indian decision-makers into making certain choices that they were reluctant to make in the past, hoping against hope that engagement with China would be enough to produce the desired results.