Category: Blog

This month marks the fifth anniversary of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initially announced as the New Silk Road Economic Belt in September 2013. As China celebrated the BRI at a special forum on August 27th, and wooed its African partners at the 2018 Beijing Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) days later, economic ministers of the members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which includes China, India, and Japan, met in Singapore to iron out details before its planned launch by the end of this year. In this RPI Policy Alert, we catch up on the recent developments in the Rising Powers’ efforts to improve connectivity and trade in the Indo-Pacific ahead of our panel “The Indo-Pacific and Regional Trends: Towards Connectivity or Conflict?” later this month.  Read more here.

What does everyday interaction with the state mean in the context of Myanmar? What does it consist of and what does it look like? More importantly, what kinds of challenges do ordinary citizens face in their everyday interaction with the state? I explored these questions in my seven weeks of summer field research in Myitkyina Township, Kachin State, which is one of 330 townships across Myanmar. In total, I conducted 21 focus group interviews, meeting 72 ordinary citizens, in 9 randomly selected wards and village tracts across Myitkyina Townships; there are 28 wards (urban zones) and 17 village tracts (rural zones) in Myitkyina Township. I also conducted a trial run (not a systematic pilot) of my survey questions on a convenient sample of 59 students. As a convenient sample of students, the sample population is much younger than the target population; more than 50% of the sample was aged 20 years or younger and about 90% of the sample was aged 28 years or younger. The vast majority of the focus group participants were Kachins, the titular ethnic group of Kachin State, but there were a few Shans and Gurkhas. In contrast, all the survey participants were Kachins.

Everyday interaction with the state refers to citizens’ mundane interactions with the street-level or minor government officials and civil servants. In Myanmar, where the government-provided welfare system is nearly nonexistent, everyday interaction with the state is mundane in every sense and primarily consists of accessing basic government services that one cannot live without. For example, a government-issued household registration document, which enumerates all the members of the household and their relationship to the head of household, is required in order to apply for a passport or a government-issued I.D., to register one’s child in a public school, or to transfer money via Western Union. To obtain such a document, one must visit a township-level immigration office and register one’s household. Other examples include visiting a municipal office to pay tax for one’s house-front shop or morning market vegetable stall and extending the deed of one’s property. Perhaps the most basic interaction is obtaining endorsement letters from local government agencies, as they are needed to apply for basic documents such as the previously mentioned household registration and government issued I.D. These visits to local government agencies and interaction with low-level minor government officials and civil servants are common experiences of all adult ordinary citizens in Burma. For example, only 9%, 4%, and 13% of the sample reported that they had not attempted to obtain a household registration, a government issued I.D, and a driver’s license respectively. In contrast, 90%, 77% and 80% of the sample reported that they have had no previous interaction with the Chief Minister of Kachin State (the highest elected official in the state, akin to governor in the U.S.), national Members of Parliament (MPs), and MPs of the state government, respectively.

These ordinary citizens face several challenges in accessing basic government services, and these challenges can be thought of as efficiency-related or ethnic in nature. Examples of efficiency-related challenges include substantial distances of travel by local residents, especially those that reside in the rural parts of the township, to government offices, which are located in the downtown area of the township, only to be told to return the next day because the official with whom they need to meet was away or busy. One local resident I surveyed visited the office of the land records department in her township to inquire if her plots of land were on the list of “uncultivated land” or “land without owner.” She was told to come back the next day because the person in charge of that matter was not in the office that day. She wondered why the office could not publish a list of “uncultivated land” that the local residents could check the current status of their land. Similarly, an attempt to apply for a deed took four years because the respondent was required to make repeated journeys to the government office. Yet another respondent reported that when she applied for a building permit from the township municipal office to construct a new building on her land, she was asked to obtain endorsement letters from four local government agencies. The respondent explained that obtaining a letter from just one of the agencies took several days if not weeks. By the time she successfully secured all the endorsement letters, it was sometime in December. Thus, by the time she showed up to the municipal office with all the necessary documents, it was already the new year, and she was told that she could not apply for a building permit with endorsement letters from the previous year. She could not protest and quickly started over in great frustration.

One of the key challenges that ordinary citizens face in accessing basic government services is corruption, especially bribery. Having to pay more than the officially enumerated fees for basic government services has always been part of the Myanmar experience as far as the current generation is concerned. In the past, people rarely visited local government offices to conduct their official matters; rather they hired poi-zas, or middlemen, who applied for household registration documents, I.D.s, passports or conducted other official business on their behalf for a fee. Of course, these people who hired poi-zas would still be responsible for the extra fees paid to the government officials and civil servants, in addition to the poi-za fee. In the past few years, the prevalence of poi-zas has dwindled, but the extra fees paid to the officials and civil servants remain. One of the interviewees recounted how she was told that her daughter would have to wait about 20 days to receive her government-issued I.D. Although she explained that her daughter was scheduled to travel to the neighboring Shan State and needed an I.D. to make the trip, the civil servant remained firm that the waiting time was 20 days. However, when she gifted him 10,000 kyats, she was told that the I.D. would become available for pick up by the next morning!

When the Aung San Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy (NLD) commenced its tenure in the government, there was a noticeable shift with regards to bribery scenes at the local government offices and agencies. Combatting corruption is a defining principle of the NLD. As a result, the civil servants were banned from accepting gifts worth more than 25,000 kyats (about $18). However, the effectiveness of the NLD’s anti-corruption campaign has rather mixed-results for ordinary citizens’ experience in their attempts to access basic government services. Some respondents reported that the services that used to cost an extra fee of 50,000 kyat were now virtually free. Others complained that accessing basic government services was now slower and more complicated than before because the civil servants would not overtly accept gifts. Some would not accept gifts overtly, if at all, and thus, could not be cajoled into processing ones’ document faster than the normal wait time, which is rarely ever reasonable. Others do accept gifts, but only discreetly, and figuring out how manage this became yet another burden for the locals trying to access basic government services.

Beyond issues of efficiency and corruption, there may be additional challenges faced by ordinary citizens who are ethnic minorities. While the official language in Myanmar is Burmese, ethnic minorities primarily speak their ethnic languages at home. Therefore, it is not surprising that 55% of the survey sample agreed that their level of Burmese language proficiency prevents them from adequately expressing their needs to local government officials and civil servants. Again, this is from a convenient sample of students who are much younger and presumably more proficient in the Burmese language than the larger Kachin population. Furthermore, several interviewees from ethnic minorities mentioned that they are often apprehensive of visiting government offices, though it is unclear what the source of this is. An interviewee, who is currently a civil servant in a local government agency, recalled that her superior remarked how few complaints his office has received from local residents compared to the office where he was previously posted, which was an ethnic majority dominated area. Due to lack of data, it is not yet possible to tell whether some challenges systematically affect ethnic minorities more so than ethnic majorities.

Is the government doing anything to alleviate these challenges? As mentioned previously, the current government launched an anti-corruption campaign at the beginning of its tenure, though it is unclear if this campaign alleviates or creates more challenges for local residents. Within the last couple of years, the government has begun to establish one-stop-shop (OSS) government offices in several townships; OSS offices house authorized representatives from more than 9 local government agencies under one roof and are meant to make it easier for the local residents apply for necessary endorsement letters and official documents. Beyond measures to tackle efficiency, the government seems to be oblivious to the fact that some of its citizens may face unique obstacles in accessing basic government services precisely due to their ethnicity.

By Jangai Jap, Sigur Field Research Grant Recipient for Summer 2018. Jangai is a Ph.D. Candidate in George Washington University’s Political Science Department. Her research interest includes ethnic politics, national identity, local government and Myanmar politics. Her dissertation aims to explain factors that shape ethnic minorities’ attachment to the state and why has the state been more successful in winning over a sense of attachment from members of some ethnic minority groups than other ethnic minority groups. She has won the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and her dissertation research has received support from the Cosmos Club Foundation and GW’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies. 

My dissertation focuses on the severe flooding and massive riverine erosion in the island of Majuli, Assam. For over a century, Majuli has been losing an average of 3.1 square kilometers of land to the waters of the surrounding river, the Brahmaputra. In the past 20 years, the island has lost up to 8.5 square kilometers of land in certain years (Lahiri and Sinha 2014). Last year was particularly bad for the village of Sitadhar where I conducted most of my field work in 2017 and 2018. In early June, the rising waters of the Brahmaputra overflowed into fields and homes, causing much damage. In late May and early June this year, my interlocutors in Majuli brought my attention to areas that had been severely hit by floods in 2017. On the worst days, entire villages had to be evacuated. Several residents had suffered significant losses: homes had to be repaired, farms had to be restored, and cow sheds and pig sties had to be rebuilt. The Mishing temple dedicated to the deities of the animist religion Donyi Polo had collapsed and had to be reconstructed. As they went about their harvest in June, my interlocutors also spent time reinforcing their stilt-houses and repairing their boats, all the while hoping that the rains would not be as fierce this year.

But it is not simply a question of the rains. Geologists and political scientists attribute the ferocious attack of the Brahmaputra to three geological and anthropogenic factors: seismic activity beneath the riverbed (Lahiri and Sinha 2014), poorly coordinated hydraulic and embankment projects along the river’s course (Saikia 2011), and global climate change (Wilson et al. 2017). As these geological and anthropogenic factors come together, it is hard to ignore the fact that Majuli is a microcosm of a problem that is global.

Even as I went about my fieldwork, I could not help but become attentive to the floods in Delhi and Kerala. I was in Delhi in late July and August, when stories of floods around the Yamuna began to break on the daily news. As I brought it up during breakfast at the home where I was a paid house-guest for the entire duration of my stay, Raju, one of the men working for the family,  told me that the Yamuna had not quite overflown its banks. The water levels had merely risen, but this was enough to flood the homes of those who lived by the river—on the embankments and sometimes in the dry riverbed. In the summer months, when the river ran dry, families that migrated to the city settled on the riverbeds. During the monsoons, as the water levels began to rise, these families were the most vulnerable. The problem, Raju stated, was not because of the environment alone. It was because of poor urban planning and the failure of the welfare state to take care of the city’s impoverished migrant laborers.

All summer news of severe rains and floods in Kerala have also been breaking on all news channels. With three months of incessant rain, several rivers have overflowed along the Malabar coast, and are now affecting families living not only in Kerala but in Tamil Nadu, the neighboring state into which the rivers flow. As I write this post, the death toll in Kerala has risen to 167. In early August, my aunt who lives in north Malabar called us to talk about a cartoon she had seen in a Malayalam newspaper. The cartoon showed a river feeling flummoxed by the construction projects that had taken over its banks, leaving no room for the river to overflow during the monsoons. As areas surrounding rivers become sites for building roads, resorts, and housing projects, or conversely the only places left for impoverished citizens to settle, the overflowing waters destroy either what is valued both by the state and by private owners as “property,” and causes damage to already vulnerable populations.

Poor planning was also blamed in the Chennai floods of 2015. As the coastal city, which was once part swamp, turned into a site for massive development projects run by corporates as well as the government, the grounds that once absorbed and harnessed the rain water disappeared beneath tons of concrete. The waters instead flooded residential areas causing displacement, destruction and death.

Several of these floods and disasters are beyond the control of human agency alone. It is true that Majuli sits on a tectonic plate, and that the south-east monsoons have been particularly harsh this year and that the waters of the Yamuna will rise every monsoon. However, as the desire to become “developed” sweeps across India, the landscape is being taken over by haphazard and poorly coordinated construction projects. These projects also displace the city’s most impoverished citizens and force them to settle in the most vulnerable zones.

As Amitav Ghosh notes in his recent book, The Great Derangement (2016), disaster of this magnitude has been banished to the realm of fiction for so long that it takes us a while to become attuned to the new reality we face: global environmental precarity. When faced with these events we are more likely to feel shocked and numbed than become convinced that there is an urgent need to rethink “development.” As Anna Tsing (2015) notes, precarity and vulnerability are not simply problems of people of one class, gender or race. While some groups are selectively more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, global warming truly does affect everyone. The flooding waters of the Brahmaputra are more likely to first hit those who have been reduced to making their homes on the embankments, but the floods also affect others who may harbor a false sense of security and consider themselves out of harm’s way because of the privilege of class.

There is a need then to wake up to this reality and to act tactically. Felman, in her book Governing Gaza (2016), draws attention to a form of governance she calls tactical governance, “a means of governing that shifts in response to crisis, that often works without long-term planning, and that presumes little stability in governing conditions” (2008:165). Tactical governance might be one solution to the large scale environmental precarity that the planet faces. Additionally, there is a need to simultaneously study how local communities work to produce local knowledge that may have particular salience in particular environments. What worries me as I wind up my summer is that the Indian government is very far from developing tactics to overcome precarity. On August 15th, when India celebrated its 71st Independence Day, the prime minister thought it a fine time to announce that India was getting ready for a manned mission to space in 2022. That too, of course, calls for tactics. But it also draws away resources from a more dire problem here and now.

 

By Shweta Krishnan, Sigur Center Field Research Grant Recipient for Summer 2018. Shweta is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the George Washington University. Krishnan examines religion, environment, and transnational connections in Majuli, a river island in the Indian state of Assam, which is subject to massive erosion by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Her research examines how geological transformations on this island shape the memories of transnational migrations, the practice of religion, and the ethics of subject formation.

 

References:

Feldman, Ilana. 2008. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Lahiri, Siddharth and Rajiv Sinha. 2014. “Morphotectonic Evolution of the Majuli Island in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, India Inferred from Geomorphic and Geophysical Analysis.” Geomorphology 227(2014): 101-111.

Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2011. Forest and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, Alana M., Sierra Gladfelter, Mark W. Williams, Sonika Shahi, Prashant Baral, Richard Armstrong, and Adina Racoviteanu. 2017. “High Asia: The International Dynamics of Climate Change and Water Security.” Journal of Asian Studies 76(2):457-480.

While my research does not focus on the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), it was hard to avoid talking about it this summer in Assam. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu right-wing party, formed a coalition government in 2016, one of its mandates has been to publish an NRC update which will outline the legal citizens of the state. Assam has had a long and entangled relationship with the region of Bengal, a part of which—East Bengal—became the country of Bangladesh. Shortly after the 1905 partition of Bengal under the British government, Assam and some of the neighboring zones were still legislatively and juridically a part of this British territory. In 1947, however, Assam was brought under the independent territory of India, while East Bengal became East Pakistan, a part of the independent country of Pakistan. In 1971, when East and West Pakistan became independent from each other after a complex, violent struggle, East Bengal became Bangladesh. During the times of partition and political violence, people from the region of East Bengal/Bangladesh migrated into the region of Assam.

Borders seem impermeable: they appear to make hermetic containers out of nations. They are believed to keep out those elements that could contaminate the attempt to achieve a national identity within. But the very desire to make the border impermeable is often accompanied by anxieties around the porosity of the border and the fear that the nation will inevitably become contaminated. Such anxieties played a role in the creation and implementation of the National Registry of Citizens in 1951. Indian citizens were identified as persons who entered the sovereign state of India before November 26, 1949. Registering yourself with the nation would allow you to claim legal status as an Indian citizen. The “others” could be identified as foreigners and deported. However, in spite of these attempts to seal the border, migrants from Bangladesh continued to come into Assam. In 1983, the central government, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, created the Illegal Migration Act to mitigate the situation. However, the act made the police—rather than the defendant—responsible for producing evidence of illegality. As evidence of citizenship is sometimes hard to produce, the act made it difficult to delineate “foreigners.” The act was met with protest in Assam, led by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). Among the protesters was Sarbananda Sonowal, the now chief minister of Assam.

In 1985, the central government signed the Assam Accord, which promised to update the NRC in Assam. The government sought to grant citizenship to all migrants who had entered India before March 25, 1971. However, the Accord was never really enforced, leading to further unrest in Assam. In 2005, after the AASU protested again, the central government and the government of Assam renewed attempts to enforce the NRC.

The displeasure in Assam paved the way for the victory of the current right-wing led coalition. The aforementioned Acts and Accords were brought in by the Indian National Congress (INC) party both at the center and in the state of Assam. As of late, however, the INC has been losing trust among the voters. In 2014, a right-wing led coalition won the national elections and formed the government at the center under the leadership of Narendra Modi. One of their promises was to address the “ineffective” governance of the INC. In 2016, the BJP joined hands with two local parties in Assam—the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) and the Assam Gana Parishad (AGP)—to contest and win the state elections, and ultimately defeated the INC in Assam. Incidentally, the man who led BJP in this victory was Sarbananda Sonowal, who had already demonstrated his interest in the NRC. It must come as no surprise that his government has pursued the immigration question and is keen to implement the National Register of Citizens Update in Assam. This would mean, however, that anyone who is not registered through this bureaucratic processes can be deported.

 

Given the BJP’s pro-Hindutva ideology, it is obvious that the current government’s interest in the NRC is yet another attempt to keep people who identify as Muslim out of India. However, the history of the NRC in Assam is a little more complex and cannot be distilled to any one political party’s political motives. Historically, the Bengalis and the Assamese have shared a tenuous relationship. When the colonial regime brought Assam under East Bengal, both Bengali Nationalist and Assamese Nationalist movements had already begun to take root. Not only were they opposed to the colonial regime, but they also became antagonistic to each other because of linguistic differences. Similarly, communities delineated by the British as “tribes,” such as the Bodos, have continued  to agitate against Assamese as well as Bengali hegemony in their region. Thus, local parties such as the BFP and AGP have historical reasons for backing the BJP. Of course, the Hindu right-wing’s own interest—voiced by Sonowal in several interviews over the past two years—in deporting Bengali Muslims while desiring to demonstrate leniency towards Bengali Hindus is another factor. The desire to mandate the NRC Update thus represents multiple complex motivations to define, detect and deport undesirable subjects out of the state of Assam. While the BJP, BFP and the AGP differ on several grounds, the NRC Update has given them reason to come together over the immigrant issue in spite of their mutual differences.

That said, this bill does not bode well for several migrants who have made home in Assam since 1971. Last summer, I met Muslim families during my travels, who had a very different point of view. According to these families, as well as some Hindu and indigenous families that I also spoke to, these migrants are part of the labor force that sustains both agricultural ventures as well as development projects in Assam. Expunging them might prove impossible or foolish from an economic point of view. Other families I spoke to believe that the interest in implementing the NRC simply reopens old wounds and prevents a future in which immigrants may be allowed to make a life in Assam. There are also concerns that all Bengalis or all Muslims would be discriminated against socially, even if not legally, because of the NRC. These conversations were rarer, and most people I spoke to believed that there was a need to secure the border of Assam by implementing stricter laws on immigration.

This issue comes at a time when immigration—and in general, the question of the “foreigner”—has become salient in many countries across the world. It also raises the question: who is indigenous? In areas such as Assam which have enjoyed centuries of interconnectivity with Tibet, Southern China, Bhutan, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, and the rest of India through the state of West Bengal, what does it mean to be labelled indigenous or foreign? Though my dissertation—which is on environmental precarity and the floods along the Brahmaputra—does not get into this issue directly, I hope to uncover more about the tensions between indigeneity, settler colonialism, and later immigrants as I do more fieldwork.

 

By Shweta Krishnan, Sigur Center Field Research Grant Recipient for Summer 2018. Shweta is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the George Washington University. Krishnan examines religion, environment, and transnational connections in Majuli, a river island in the Indian state of Assam, which is subject to massive erosion by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Her research examines how geological transformations on this island shape the memories of transnational migrations, the practice of religion, and the ethics of subject formation.

 

On August 6, 2018, the United States re-imposed the first set of economic sanctions on Iran as part of its exit from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). These initial sanctions included the ban of transactions with Iran using US banknotes, precious metals, passenger aircraft, and Iranian-made products like carpets and automobiles. The second wave of sanctions, which will include penalties to companies in third countries that continue to do business with Iran and sanctions against Iranian oil, is scheduled to take effect on November 4, 2018. In response, the European Union (EU) issued an updated Blocking Statute “to protect EU companies doing legitimate business with Iran from the impact of US extra-territorial sanctions.” The Blocking Statute allows affected EU companies to sue the US for damages, but also allows suits against EU companies that back out of Iran. Although the EU’s countermeasures have taken the spotlight, the Rising Powers aren’t taking the development lying down. Read more here.

On July 25-27, 2018, delegations from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa met in Johannesburg for the 10th BRICS Summit. The resulting Johannesburg Declaration placed a heavy emphasis on trade relations, multilateralism, and the bloc’s commitment to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, in a stark juxtaposition against recent US foreign policy shifts. The summit included a joint session with delegations from eighteen invited African states as well as sideline bilateral meetings with Argentina, Jamaica, and Turkey, in an apparent continuation of China’s BRICS-Plus format when it hosted the 9th BRICS Summit in September 2017. Despite official statements reiterating the strength and relevancy of the bloc, reception of BRICS in the member Rising Powers remains mixed. Read more here.

Eyes were trained on Russia for the last month as the country hosted the 2018 FIFA World Cup, but the spotlight followed Russian President Vladimir Putin to Helsinki as he met with US President Donald Trump in the pair’s first official bilateral summit. Many analysts were apprehensive about the tournament given Russia’s strained relations with many Cup-qualifying countries, and expectations for the Helsinki Summit were mixed given the ongoing investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections, the suspicious nerve-agent poisoning of Russian double spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and two unrelated civilians in the United Kingdom, and ongoing disagreements about Crimea and Syria. In this RPI Policy Alert, the Rising Powers offer their reviews of Russia’s performance as host to the World Cup and negotiator in Norway. Read more here.

What makes contemporary Japan Japanese? Walking around the famous Ginza area of Tokyo, I couldn’t help but think of similar, high-profile shopping centers in Beijing, Seoul, and London. It’s a good example of how globalization and modernization made the world more connected and reduced its varieties in culture and landscape. Are we really living in a “global village”?

The experiences in Japan gave me a clear answer: no. For starters, the further one walks away from large and international cities such as Tokyo, the more Japanese characteristics one will encounter. Taking the Skyliner express between Tokyo and Narita International Airport, I had a quite good general view of Japanese countryside. At first glance it became obvious that the population density was much more than that of rural America, and the farmland is mostly cultivated by small landowners. One could never mistake this scenario for the large, sparsely populated rural area of the United States. Even regarding life in Tokyo, the more carefully I think about it, the more Japanese it becomes. Food occupied much of my interests. Though I can easily find Japanese food in America, the quality is, unsurprisingly, much lower than that in Japan. One definitely enjoyable and authentic way to test this hypothesis is to visit Tsukiji district, where the best sushi restaurants could be found in Tokyo.

Another entertaining way for history students to embrace Japanese characteristics is to visit a Japanese bookstore. In the main Kinokuniya bookstore in Shinjuku, an intriguing theme that appears across many different sections is Saigo Takamori, a legendary samurai in the early Meiji period. Not only did Saigo’s name occupy prominent positions on the history shelves, but in literature and the entertainment sector as well. In fact, the NHK is now broadcasting a new TV drama series of Saigo’s life in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration. Historical figures such as Saigo are an inherent part of Japanese collective memory, which is not shared by any other countries.

 

By Zhongtian Han, Sigur Center Summer 2018 Field Research Grant Fellow. Zhongtian is a history Ph.D. student at George Washington University. He is interested in modern East Asia and strategic studies, and his research focuses on the strategic history of modern China and Japan.

Despite international outcry, the United States is continuing its pursuit of protectionist trade policies and dismantlement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Iran’s nuclear program. As negotiations over new US tariffs have soured and the Trump administration announced secondary sanctions against countries that continue to import Iranian oil after November 4, 2018, the calls for resistance–and outright retaliation–by the Rising Powers are growing louder. Read more here.

Many of the educated public in Western countries have doubted China’s claim that it is still a “developing country.” Indeed, much evidence has been cited to support this point of view: skyscrapers lighting the night in large Chinese cities, high-speed bullet trains roaming throughout the country, Chinese customers filling up luxurious brand stores overseas, and successful technological innovation of Chinese companies. However, sitting on a high-speed bullet train from Nanjing to Beijing and seriously considering the issue, I feel it would be fundamentally misleading to consider China as a fully developed and modernized country.

One argument which is often used to refute the “China as developed country” thesis is the variety within China. Though no country is monolithic and homogeneous, China may be worthy of some special treatment. In particular, the extremely rapid economic development since 1980s contributed significantly to the varieties in economic status within the country. In major Chinese cities such as Nanjing and Beijing, it is easy to see that the economic gaps between urban sectors are much larger than major Western cities, which reflects the large gaps in economic status within the Chinese society.

Nonetheless, I feel a more fundamental and powerful challenge to the “China as developed country” thesis is to broaden our understanding of development and modernization. At present, too much attention has been paid to the narrow economic and technological sense of the term. Take education as an example. In American and British universities, most courses (both undergraduate and graduate) are either seminars or have a seminar component. However, no Chinese college student could imagine such lavish use of educational resources. Most undergraduate courses and many graduate courses are lecture-only. Another way to illustrate the point is to compare the experiences of Ph.D. students. Ph.D. students in most American universities are fully funded, with many additional financial support opportunities for their research projects. In comparison, Chinese Ph.D. students usually have to conduct their research with much less financial support. American and British higher education systems have been seriously criticized for their high fees, but it’s undeniable that the educational resources they could devote to students are far greater than their Chinese counterparts.

Education is just one example of many specific aspects of development that deserves the focus of serious observers, including medical service, labor welfare, and social capital. For both China and other countries, this more sophisticated and careful understanding of development is imperative to prevent mis-perceptions and illusions. As the discussion about the “rise” of China becomes more and more popular in both China and abroad, the importance of accurate understanding could not be exaggerated.

 

By Zhongtian Han, Sigur Center Summer 2018 Field Research Grant Fellow. Zhongtian is a history Ph.D. student at George Washington University. He is interested in modern East Asia and strategic studies, and his research focuses on the strategic history of modern China and Japan.

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Chairman Kim Jong Un met in an unprecedented summit on the island of Sentosa in Singapore June 11-12, 2018. The resulting joint statement expresses the intentions of both countries to normalize relations and to work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Optimists pointed to acts of goodwill by both sides, such as North Korea’s commitment to repatriation of the remains of US soldiers and the US’s cancellation of the Freedom Guardian joint exercises with South Korea, as evidence that the summit marked the beginning of a new chapter in US-North Korea relations. Pessimists, meanwhile, argue that the joint statement does not go far enough and that the US is sacrificing its allies’ security for little more than a photo op. In this RPI Policy Alert, we continue our coverage of this year’s summer summits and perspectives from the Rising Powers. Read more here.

It’s not even halfway through the month of June and the Rising Powers have already had a busy month of summits with their counterparts. The Group of Seven (G7) met in Quebec, Canada, June 8-9, 2018, while the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) convened in Qingdao, China, June 9-10, 2018. The G7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. SCO’s membership comprises China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as ten other observer and partner states in Eurasia. As many analysts note, the two blocs exhibit a striking contrast between the predominantly Western, industrialized powerhouses in international politics and a growing coalition of rising states whose interests have not been served by the status quo. In this first part of RPI’s coverage of the Rising Powers’ summer summits, we examine domestic responses to the successes, failures, and unprecedented personal dramas of the G7 and SCO. Read more here.

RPI Director Deepa M. Ollapally’s guest column, “Reset and Realism in China-India Relations,” was featured in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Centre on Asia and Globalization’s China-India Brief #115. Read the whole article here.

Will US leadership in the “Indo-Pacific” simply focus on the Pacific side or not? RPI Director Deepa Ollapally provides analysis in her chapter  “The United States and the Indian Ocean: Powers Shifts and Uncertain Leadership” in the new book Maritime Governance and South Asia: Trade, Security, and Sustainable Development in the Indian Ocean.

 

The Rising Powers are undoubtedly recovering from whiplash following the off-again-on-again saga of the summit between the US and North Korea scheduled to take place in Singapore on June 12, 2018. Preparations for the Summit soured following a series of ill-timed demonstrations of strength despite acts of goodwill. Both North Korea and the US threatened to pull out of the Summit in recent weeks, but ultimately it was President Trump who announced that the meeting “will not take place” in an open letter to North Korean leader Chairman Kim Jong Un. Following President Trump’s announcement, President Moon met with Chairman Kim in the unscheduled Second Inter-Korean Summit along the border between the two countries and a US delegation met with North Korean officials in Pyongyang. For now, all signs point to the Summit meeting as planned, but analysts in the Rising Powers had tough words for both sides’ role in the drama. Read more here.

SaveSave

SaveSave