In the nineteenth century, the Wuyi Mountains in northwest Fujian emerged as a key centre of China’s famed tea industry. Located in the mountain cliffs were more than a hundred factories producing a global commodity that had become integral to the country’s economic fortunes. The factories were maintained by merchants based in the market town of Chongan…
In school, I had always noticed ‘China (Tibet)’ or ‘Tibet (China)’ on maps showing India’s borders and wondered why no one talked about it, why the fuss was always about Pakistan. And in those days there really were not too many places to go looking for information either. So when the ‘Tiananmen Incident’ of June 4, 1989 happened in China…
The South China Sea is a semi-enclosed area measuring 3.6 million square kilometres in the Pacific Ocean. It spreads from the Straits of Malacca and Karimata to Taiwan Straits and is bordered in the north by China and Taiwan, the Philippines in the East, Brunei and Malaysia in the south, and Vietnam in the West. It contains numerous islands…
The rapid deterioration of China’s relations with India over the past year has generated voluminous literature. Kingshuk Nag’s contribution to this body of work, A New Silk Road is an excellent primer on the India-China bilateral relationship. Nag takes a very hawkish position throughout this book and perceives China…
China is arguably India’s most important bilateral relationship and its foremost foreign and security policy challenge. India-China ties are complex and fraught. Kanti Bajpai presents these in an accessible way. His analysis, based on years of research and thinking, is refined and expressed lucidly. The conclusions he draws are stark and maybe disagreeable…
Pan-Asianism is a general term used to describe a wide range of ideas and movements that called for the solidarity of Asian peoples to counter western influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concept of Pan-Asianism first emerged in Japan sometime in the late 19th century. The movement gained wider acceptance following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).