New year, same stalemate on the LAC, and more Jack Ma rumours
Welcome to today's The India China Newsletter.
"Stalemate on the Line of Actual Control" is probably going to be a headline we will see a lot of in 2021. I think I will need a good thesaurus to find new ways of saying the same thing. Reports this week in India suggest both sides are preparing for the long-haul as the stand-off continues with no signs of disengagement.
Yesterday (January 4) Zee News in India reported China had deployed some 25 tanks opposite Indian posts south of Pangong Lake. I haven’t been able to confirm if this is a new development but it may well be something that happened in September, shortly after India moved in late August to secure strategic heights south of the lake, heights it is still dominating. The Times of India reports today India has fast-tracked the order for a dozen specialized fast-patrol boats to patrol the lake.
Ajay Banerjee at The Tribune reports on the Ministry of Defence year-end review on the situation on the LAC. It’s a sign of the times and how laconic the government has been on the biggest border crisis in years that it takes a year-end review to tell us China had used ‘unorthodox’ weapons at the LAC, but we don’t know if this refers to the crude nail-studded clubs used at the Galwan Valley or supposed microwave weapons that the Chinese State media said were used south of Pangong Lake (but don’t seem to have worked considering India is still on the heights).
The review said: “The Indian Army has maintained all protocols and agreements between the two countries, while the PLA escalated the situation by the utilisation of unorthodox weapons and amassing a large number of troops. There were unilateral and provocative actions by the Chinese to change the status quo by force, in more than one area on the LAC. These were responded to in a firm and non-escalatory way, ensuring the sanctity of our claims in Eastern Ladakh.”
India’s Ambassador to China, Vikram Misri, has a piece today in the South China Morning Post, but doesn’t delve into relations with China or the boundary situation. I wonder if the SCMP has become the choice now for op-eds for foreign envoys in China, having heard from a couple of embassies in Beijing that the State media in Beijing were increasingly refusing to publish pieces by foreign envoys (and when they did, were editing them before publishing).
The Jack Ma rumours I spoke about in yesterday’s newsletter are not going anywhere.
Today was a great case study in how the rumour mill churns. “Jack Ma arrested?” asked the Business Today website in India. It quoted the “Asia Times” quoting the People’s Daily saying he was “embracing supervision” . This news also made it to India Today and other television channels that reported the People’s Daily had said he was under “supervision”.
This may turn out to be true eventually but today’s story was really shoddy sourcing. The original source was this article in a website called Asia Times Financial (no relation to Asia Times, which Business Today wrongly attributed), which reported that the official People’s Daily had reported the news.
Which would have been huge if true. But what was curious was the article didn’t link to the original People's Daily piece, and no major international wire service in Beijing seemed to have found this People’s Daily report (neither could I).
That this website had broken one of the biggest China stories in years when no other major wire service had reported it, apparently wasn’t enough for a red flag for our media to run with it. (It should have been.) As Aadil Brar noted on Twitter, the source the article seemed to cite (but didn’t link) was a People’s Daily piece from 2019 (!).
I have no idea at this point, as I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, if Ma is under suspicion, or lying low to assist the investigations into his group that we know are under way. So far, I see little hard evidence to suggest he will personally be in the dock as the regulators have not really hinted at criminal wrongdoing of any kind, so it’s unlikely (but not impossible) he will end up in hot water. What’s clear is the group is certainly in for a tough time. I hope we find out soon enough only because the longer the rumour mill churns, the more frustrating it is going to be to cover this story. As reminded today, our basic standards of fact-checking and verifying original sources have fallen through the floor.
Li Yuan writes in the New York Times: “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom”
Here’s one for followers of elite Party politics. Is institutionalism still a useful prism to read the tea leaves, asks Tristan Kenderdine.
And finally…
A moving thread on the unsung heroes who toil long hours every day to keep China’s e-commerce businesses ticking (and profitable). Behind the “efficiency” that tech companies crave is a human cost.