India and China in the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, lessons from China's farms, and a Xinjiang survivor's story

Welcome to today's The India China Newsletter.

The Trump administration, as a parting gift for reporters on the foreign policy beat, just declassified its 2018 "US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific". You can read the whole thing here.

There are no great shocks or surprises (which left me wondering what those redacted bits, most referencing Southeast Asia, were). I still found it a useful marker of the last four years and the legacy Trump leaves behind in the Indo-Pacific, which is rather mixed -- positive with India and the Quad on security issues, less so on its economic agenda and in offering a credible economic alternative to China, an agenda that was, right from day one, in stark contrast to the trade goals he pursued including with US allies and partners. (I have a piece on the document and Trump’s mixed record out later tonight and in tomorrow's newspaper, which I'll link to in the next newsletter.)

The Hindustan Times has a useful report on the India sections of the document and its objectives to "counterbalance" China.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted quite sharply to it. I thought both the question at today's daily press conference in Beijing from Xinhua, and the answer from Zhao Lijian, a part of which I am reproducing below, were interesting:

Xinhua News Agency: The U.S. government reportedly declassified 30 years earlier than normal an Indo-Pacific strategy, which contains elements including defending Taiwan, accelerating India’s rise as a counterbalance to China and maintain U.S. dominance in the region. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: Some U.S. politicians want to leave behind a “legacy” by declassifying the document, but its content only serves to expose the malign intention of the United States to use its Indo-Pacific strategy to suppress and contain China and undermine regional peace and stability. In essence, this is a strategy of hegemony. I can point out at least three major mistakes in it. 

First, it highlights the Cold War mentality and military confrontation, which goes against the mutually-beneficial spirit of regional cooperation, runs counter to regional people’s aspiration for peace, stability and development, and threatens regional prospects of peace and development. As such, it should rightly be thrown into the dustbin of history. The U.S. side is obsessed with ganging up, forming small cliques and resorting to despicable means such as wedge-driving, which fully exposed its true face as a trouble-maker undermining regional peace, stability, solidarity and cooperation. We believe countries in the region are clear-headed and vigilant enough not to be hijacked onto the U.S. chariot or be used as a tool to maintain U.S. hegemony. 

I think it's no accident Xinhua highlighted India in its question. Expect to hear a lot more about this in coming weeks and months, framed by the South Asia experts and media in Beijing as a "gotcha" moment exposing US-India designs (no matter that this is a public document). On another note, it's been quite interesting to see in the past 12 months how often the US angle has been mentioned by Chinese State media to explain the border crisis, and how infrequent it’s become to see references to India's "independent foreign policy" that used to be a mainstay of Chinese media reporting.

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In more good news for WhatsApp, already losing lots of fans in India over privacy issues (I've had more contacts sign up to Signal in the past 24 hours than in the past year), the app is being used by China-based hackers to scam users in India with the promise of jobs, says the New Delhi-based think-tank Cyberpeace Foundation.

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The Global Times reports:

The PLA recently started deploying China's first panoramic, high-precision spatial datum that covers the uncharted western border region of the country, with leading analysts saying that the system will contribute to the infrastructure construction as well as combat capability enhancement of Chinese forces in the region. Over the past two years, a navigation and mapping unit affiliated with the PLA Western Theater Command traversed over 20,000 kilometers and established the first panoramic, high-precision spatial datum in the western border region based on 3D geographic information from remote sensing images and joint situational precognition.

(Question: Does this mean fewer 'lost' soldiers across the LAC - or perhaps more?)

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With India looking to cut its reliance on supplies of Chinese Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (today accounting for 70 per cent), producers of APIs in India are seeing the gains and are among the best performing stocks in the past 12 months, reports Bloomberg.

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With farmers’ protests in India making the news, BusinessWorld looks at lessons from China's agriculture sector, which is far more productive and played a huge role in poverty reduction in rural China.

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A must-read first-hand account from Justin Jin on what it's like to travel to China right now and the quarantine measures in place for international arrivals. Two jaw-dropping anecdotes:

A medical worker measures our temperature and gives each of us a green bucket containing disinfectants: hospital-grade chlorine tablets, antimicrobial handwash and alcohol swabs. “Whenever you poo or pee, sterilise it for half an hour before flushing,” she says. “This is to protect our city’s sewage.”

Before my last day, an operator had called asking me to vacate my room by 6am so cleaners can fumigate it. “What if I oversleep?” I tease. She replies that they could lock me up for another 14 days if I run into potentially contagious new arrivals. I leave on time.

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And finally...

Surviving Xinjiang: Do take the time and read every word of this harrowing account from Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who had to travel back to Xinjiang from France to sign some papers and ended up spending months in a re-education centre. It's a difficult read, and is an incredible first-hand account of what is happening in Xinjiang, which has generated very little attention or debate in India. I often think about one of my last conversations with Ilham Tohti, the Uighur academic who is now in prison. We strolled one afternoon on the grounds of Minzu University after an interview, and he asked me why I thought the Uighur issue (this was a couple of years before the re-education camps came up) and Xinjiang more broadly, as a neighbour of India's for centuries, didn't get traction in India like Tibet did. He had a deep, great love for India and Mahatma Gandhi in particular, and had read almost all of his writings. I gave him the obvious answer, which was the Dalai Lama's presence in India, the long history with Tibet, and the fact that the Tibetan movement had such a world famous, charismatic figurehead. "There's something else too," he told me, as he looked me in the eye and smiled. "I think it's because we're Muslim".

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Thank you for reading.