Neutering & Defanging Chinese Threat (09-08-2014)

[deejay]

India needs to have a Tibet Regiment in the Indian Army which imparts military training to EVERY Tibetan and allows each one to serve in the Indian Army for some years. Let all Tibetans - men and women come from Tibet and all over the world and get first class training in warfare!

'Vikas' of all ideas is very important. Good Point sir jee.

[SSridhar]

We do have a very secretive SFF.

[merlin]

We do have a very secretive SFF.

Is it still mostly Tibetan?

[deejay]

merlin ji - It is secretive.

[deejay]

@RajeshA ji and merlin ji:

About Tibetans (Vikasis) in Indian Paramilitary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Frontier_Force

and on DFI: http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/indi ... fices.html

Maybe Rohitvats could give us more but they are para military but the 'para' here can confuse some. RV had previously posted about the them. These Vikasis are a tough group. Here is a poem of the Vikasis from DFI link above:

Hum hai Vikasi, tibbat wasi
Desh ki shyan bharayenghye

Jab jab humko milega moka
Jaan pe khel dekhayenghye

Hum hai vikasi
Chin ne humse chean ke tibbat
Ghar se hame nikala hae
Phirbi bharat ne humko,
Apno ki tara sambhala hae
Ekna Ek din chin ko bhi hum
Nako channe chabayenghye
Jab jab hum ko milega moka
Jaan pe khel dekhayenghye

Sichan glaciar main humko
Moka mila dubara hai
Hamare vir jawano ko
Nahin koyi bhi gum
Kargil hoya Bangladesh
Himmat kabhi na hare hum
Jab jab hum ko milega moka
Jaan pe khel dekhayenghye

Jahan hamara mahel potala
Norbu lingka pyara hai
Pujya dalai lama singhasan
Tabse hi nyara hai
Yad karo aun viron ko
Jisne diya balidan hai
Au milkar gayen hum
Jai hamara Tibbat Jai
Jai hamara Tibbat Jai
Jai Hamara Tibbat Jai

...

[ravip]

http://www.orbat.com


India Stupid – our new brand name for an old condition This may surprise readers, but in his personal and job life Editor is very laid back and relaxed. Insufficient money for the upcoming mortgage payment? The Upstairs Person will provide, even though Editor and Him don’t get along one bit. Car engine making horrible sounds indicating it is about to die, and no money to get it checked? Think positively, and let’s get through today, tomorrow is another day? Whole Foods weekly grocery bill comes to $46? Simply put back the vegetables. No one died from not eating enough vegetables. Dentist wants $298 co-pay to extract a dead tooth and wont even estimate implant costs since she knows Editor’s financial state? Editor wont get a date even if the tooth is replaced so why bother. House leaning to one side, contractor wants $15,000 for immediate repairs? If the house collapses, it collapses. But what if it collapses on Editor? Well, then he won’t have to worry about finding $15K for repairs or being late for work – ever.


· At work, similarly Editor is cooler than the average cucumber. Thirty kids have him backed into a corner, each screaming for individual attention now? Editor thinks how lucky he is to have 30 more grandkids, even if their behavior could be better. Two girls fighting on top of teacher who is pinned to the floor, with blood falling on him? He smiles benignly and waits for them to finish killing each other so he can stand up and resume teaching. Class of twenty-five panics at having to do a test and goes berserk, screaming, running around, throwing things, jumping on desks, girls molesting the boys, boys stealing the girls’ makeup and trying to kick each other below the belt? Editor is so grateful he has such an important job, the education of America’s future generation.

· So how come when the Government of India does something incredibly stupid regarding national security Editor goes ballistic to the point he really cannot see through the red mist that covers his eyes, blood pressure rising to 180/150, wishing he had a handful of nice 1-KT nukes that he could use on the Indian leadership, or making quick plans to return, lead a revolt, and hang the politicians and bureaucrats from the lampposts – himself?

· After all, Editor has not been back in 25-years, has explicitly vowed he will never return, and has mandated in his will that when he dies his ashes should be flushed down the toilet rather than being sent back for immersion in the Ganga River (Americans sewers are cleaner than the Ganga River, but that’s not the reason – he wants nothing to do with India).

· Here’s the reason he gets upset. Editor is just one individual among 1.2-billion Indians. What happens to him, whether he is successful in life or not, makes not the slightest difference to India. But when India’s leaders are crippling national security so effectively one wonders if they are being paid off by China – Editor refers to the new government, the old one didn’t need to be paid off to destroy India, they were doing it for free – it does matter to India and to its future. Thus Editor’s extreme anger.

· The two latest assaults on national security, made by a government that has boasted it will be tough on India’s enemies and will spare no effort to see the military gets the money it needs, concern light helicopters and border roads.

· For years the Army (197 lights) and Navy (56 lights) have been waiting for a contract to be signed so they can replace India’s Alouette 3s and Lamas, which are Alouette 2s designed specifically to India’s extreme high altitude requirements. We don’t have a good idea of the fleet’s age, but it is likely to be somewhere between 30-40 years. We aren’t talking median age, either, nor are we taking into account these helicopters have been worked to death. This is not a metaphor. But for one reason or another, the previous government would put off a decision. The new government has gone one better. It has cancelled both deals, and requested RFPs – for manufacture with Indian partners. If you know the Indian aircraft manufacturing industry and the government , this is tantamount to another 6-8 year delay – if things go well.

· The government will have several excuses for its decision. None change the reality that India immediately – as of yesterday – needs a minimum of 2000 light helicopters for the armed forces, border forces, internal security, and routine policing/air ambulance. The 250 cancelled helicopters were not a big financial deal, BTW. Perhaps $1.5-billion at 2012 prices. Indians may well be the smartest people in the world, but instead of using their smarts for the nation’s good, they use them to make excuses. If they spent half the excuse time actually doing something productive, India would catch up with China within 20-years.We’re not saying anything regarding the 1980 per capita incomes, which were higher in India than China, and now are at least 4-times less than China’s.

· The next act of genius concerns the government’s announcement it will build an 1800-km road west-east on the Indian side of the southeast Tibet border. Yes, 52 years after Indian’s defeat by China, a simple lateral road is still being planned. Meanwhile, the Chinese are doing preliminary work on a west-east railroad starting from north of Kathmandu, running along the Tibetan side of the border, and to be linked up with the Kunming-Chengdu networks. Last we heard, China planned to complete this line in six years.


· But that’s not what we’re complaining about. China has belligerently said India cannot build this road until the border issue is settled. The Indians have said no one can threaten India – that message did not reach Beijing because China HAS threatened us without specifying consequences, - and added Beijing should sit down with India to discuss the border issue.

· Huh? Excuse Editor, please: what border issue is to be negotiated? In the Northwest China has seized almost all of Indian East Ladakh. In the Northeast, in 1962 the Chinese crossed the border but then withdrew, as at that time they could not sustain a forward position. There is no need for any negotiation: China needs to get out of India – and that should not be subject to negotiation. Editor had rashly hoped with the new government, that India would convey this message to Beijing. Instead it enthusiastically greeted the Chinese President even as China was – once again – forcing India back from patrolling its rump Ladakh border, and now it is calling on China to negotiate – this totally giving in to what China wants!

· No doubt the new government is doing many wonderful things to get India moving economically. But there is also national security. The new government seems comfortable with a 1.75% GDP budget for defense, which is not even half of what is needed immediately just to modernize the armed forces, leave alone meet new threats from a rising China.

· 99.999% of Indians will not care that on national security, the new government is back to India Stupid. They are so entranced by the good things the new government is doing in the non-national security area. But it doesn’t matter how wonder a job the new government does if it cannot assure the defense and security of India. Defense and security have to come first of the nation is to survive. Do we have proof of our statement? Sure. Just look at what’s happening in Europe today.

[member_28722]

China threat requires an Asian NATO

China's increasing belligerence in the East and South China seas, and toward India, has fundamentally destabilized the security dynamics of Asia. Japan is seeking a closer alliance with India and is likely seeking advanced offensive weapons from the U.S. Vietnam is considering a U.S. alliance. China increasingly makes common cause with Russia, using unethical and illegal practices in trade and geopolitics.


The increasing belligerence of China in the East and South China seas and toward India has changed the security dynamics of Asia.
While existing bilateral alliances go partway toward defending against the resurgent autocratic threat, only a formalized multilateral treaty organization would provide the coordination necessary to defend democracy and international law in Asia against emerging threats. To survive, Asian democracies must create what might be called an Asian Treaty Organization, patterned after the successful North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe and North America.

As China is a more powerful adversary than Russia, especially considering current defense expenditures and growth trends, this multilateral defense alliance must be stronger and more unified than NATO ever has been. Asian defense organizations such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954-1977) and the still-existing Australia New Zealand U.S. Security Treaty cannot act as templates for 21st-century threats. The ATO should be designed to integrate with and ultimately strengthen NATO, in what could eventually become a single global alliance of democracies.

Partnership for peace

Membership requirements should be stricter than those of NATO and the failed Asian organizations. The ATO would initially include only democracies capable of technical warfare, including the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and potentially Taiwan. Taiwan's membership would have to be delayed until relations with China were such that the inclusion of Taiwan would decrease rather than increase the likelihood of conflict.

The historical chill in relations between South Korea and Japan must be addressed during the accession process. China and North Korea are the greatest threats in Asia not only to these two democracies but to all potential ATO members. Full Japan-South Korea rapprochement is long overdue and can be achieved through trust-building measures, reparations, apologies and policy change as necessary. Rapprochement is for the common good of all ATO entities, which should therefore jointly carry the burden through diplomatically linked financial and policy agreements. International sharing of the burden would provide face-saving measures needed by Asian democracies to join together against the common threat.

ATO would define collective defense as NATO does, including the requirement that all member states must come to the aid of any member state subjected to an armed attack. Membership would require minimum defense spending, as NATO does, of 2% of gross domestic product. This would be enforced more strictly than in NATO, with the requirement that the budgeting level must be enshrined in domestic law and that noncompliance would lead to expulsion.

A NATO-style Partnership for Peace program should include countries that do not meet the democracy and technology requirements of ATO but are closely allied with its ideological or strategic goals. Such countries include India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Mongolia, Brunei and Malaysia. The first five have technical challenges with modern warfare but are generally democratic. Singapore is technologically sophisticated but autocratic. The last four are autocratic or politically compromised but their maritime resources or trade routes are threatened or controlled by China. They are natural allies from a realist perspective. Integration of these states with ATO through a Partnership for Peace program must be gradual, customized and sensitive to each country's circumstances. But a welcoming path through democratization and development to eventual full membership should be laid, and ATO should provide these countries with democratization, development and military assistance.

Strengthening the edges

Even the autocracies of China, Cambodia and Myanmar would be invited to join the Partnership, if they met conditions such as progress toward democratization and full resolution of territorial and maritime disputes with ATO entities.

In war, the alliance would act as a unified military force under a single command. The alliance would need dedicated and fully integrated military forces, including interoperable equipment and an integrated chain of military command. Those countries with greater levels of defense spending would be accorded the highest positions. Countries with lower levels of defense spending should be woven into the command structure in such a way that they would have more influence than they would outside the alliance, or in a less formalized network of democratic cooperation.

Given that the U.S. spends five times more on the military than all the other proposed ATO members combined, the alliance would need to include the U.S. to counterbalance China militarily and offer it the top command position to incentivize it to join. No resulting increase in Chinese military spending could possibly threaten such an alliance. U.S. membership in ATO would further formalize and increase its commitment to its Asian allies, above and beyond its current bilateral treaties.

ATO would have a decentralized but forward-deployed force strategy. Member states on the front line against China and North Korea, such as Japan and South Korea, and partners such as India, Vietnam and the Philippines, would be assisted with sufficient troop deployments from other countries to reliably defend disputed areas, such as the Sino-Indian Himalayan border, the Korean demilitarized zone, and the East and South China seas. ATO would facilitate an increased naval presence from the U.S., Australia and India to roll back past Chinese gains achieved through violations of international law. Strengthening the edges of the treaty organization would effectively defend geographically protected democracies such as the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.

The uncertainty felt by some members of NATO is a weakness that should be avoided in ATO. Between 1960 and 1966, France withdrew from the NATO integrated military structure, evicted U.S. troops from its soil and developed an independent nuclear deterrent. France could not be sure that the U.S. would defend it against the former Soviet Union if a nuclear war started.

Uncertainty should be decreased for core members of ATO -- specifically Japan, South Korea and Australia -- through U.S. provision to those countries of independent nuclear deterrent forces that are nevertheless under the centralized ATO command. Such nuclear forward deployment would provide unilateral deterrence in times of need, yet integrated command in case of war. Because of ATO command and control, and with additional technical measures, this nuclear forward deployment would not violate the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Enhanced requirements

Just as Turkey is a member of NATO but far from the Atlantic, non-Asian countries meeting the stringent ATO requirements should be welcome to join ATO, which would help integrate ATO with NATO countries and other powerful democracies. Likewise, ATO should facilitate integration and membership of its core countries with NATO. As ATO would have more stringent requirements than NATO, these enhanced requirements should eventually be adopted by NATO in order for a joint NATO-ATO to emerge. This should be a global alliance of democracies such that the military forces of democratic countries are efficiently and effectively arrayed to contain the expansionism of autocratic states.

The creation of an Asian version of NATO would not preclude regional confidence-building measures, such as the development of an Asian grouping along the lines of the 57-member Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The goals of ATO and an Asian OSCE would be complementary and symbiotic. They would support each other and could be pursued at the same time.

The proposed ATO alliance of Asian democracies would be patterned after the NATO alliance that won the Cold War against the Soviet Union but with alterations in its architecture that would transform weaknesses into strength. The ATO alliance would be an improvement over NATO through enforcement of a 2% defense-spending target, forward deployment of strategic nuclear forces to all core members equally and deployment of conventional military force such that the edges of the alliance were fully protected. As global instability and the threat of autocratic maritime and territorial aggressions increase, the democracies of Asia must act decisively to create what would likely become the strongest multilateral alliance in the world.

[SSridhar]

Guys, a request. Please use Quote tags.

[vijaykarthik]

Qn to the people who are aware:

Does anyone know about the Nicaragua Canal? Is there a chance in hell that work will start as its promised in Dec?

Adding this qn in the Chinese threat because its the Chinese and HK jokers who are trying to design, develop and fund that 'disaster'. Per reports, it costs about 40-50bn [strange that the numbers are in tht huge a range when its measured in billions] while sceptics mention that it will be closer to 80-100bn.

Env report expected sometime this month end and that too by McKinsey. WOW.

Does anyone have an opinion (or an idea) as to what the current deal is / what the deadlines are / what can possibly happen?

[SSridhar]

India, China agree to defuse tensions - Suhasini Haider, The Hindu

Indian and Chinese diplomats agreed to defuse tensions of the past three months at a two-day meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) in Delhi that concluded here on Friday. But a month after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed to restarting the high-level talks of Special Representatives on border issues, India is yet to announce its nominee for the dialogue.

Sources tell The Hindu that officials in New Delhi and Beijing are deadlocked over “issues of bureaucratic rank,” given that Chinese Special Representative Yang Jiechi is a “state councillor,” equal to the Indian rank of Minister of State, while National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, who would have been the obvious choice for the post, has not been designated to that rank.

Ahead of Mr. Xi’s visit to India, Mr. Doval travelled to Beijing as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy, and the announcement of his nomination as Special Representative was expected during the President’s visit. However, Chinese officials made it clear informally that Mr. Doval should have the Minister of State rank for the talks to continue. Former NSAs Shivshankar Menon and M.K. Narayanan were both of that rank. Upset with China’s rebuff, New Delhi is learnt to have put off the announcement.

Some reports speculated that the Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board Shyam Saran or India’s Ambassador to the U.S., S. Jaishankar, both of whom have been Ambassadors to China, could be alternative choices and would be given other responsibilities on external security issues.

Experts say the delay has come at the cost of resumption of dialogue at the highest level, making the Line of Actual Control more vulnerable to stand-offs of the kind seen in Chumar {Who are these experts who say this? India and China have had 18 rounds of these discussions and even then there has been minimal progress. The Chinese intrude and cause stand-offs when their PM & President come on a state visit or our Defence Minister visits Beijing in spite of rounds after rounds of SR talks.} since July 25 — first over the construction of a road near Chumar by China and then an irrigation canal and observation post by India.

“Clearly, without having the Special Representatives in place, the government cannot signal any interest in resuming this very important process of clarifying the LAC,” says Srinath Raghavan {Oh, he is the expert being referred to? He is a China-leaning expert. I expected him to be referred to in The Hindu and I was not disappointed} , a military expert at the Centre for Policy Research.

[vijaykarthik]

China and the myriad Chinese ways of fiction, fantasy, story-telling and how to weave all of them to make it appear sensible.

SCS

Flashpoint in the South China Sea

“Considerably more dangerous internationally than Hong Kong or Tibet is the problem of the South China Sea… The Seventh Fleet needs to be strengthened sufficiently to guarantee continued free passage through the South China Sea and all Southeast Asian sea lanes.” The words sound like they could have come from today’s headlines, especially after the recent BBC article, “Why is the US Navy Practicing for War with China?”

But these sentences actually appeared 17 years ago, in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists story by Chalmers Johnson, a professor of Asian Studies at the University of California at San Diego, who noted the significantly increased defense budgets of nations in this forgotten area—and the fact that China had massively upped the ante by claiming the entire South China Sea and authorizing its navy to evict trespassers by force. “These actions offered a compelling argument for a continued American naval presence in East Asia,” he wrote in his 1997 Bulletin story, “The Chinese Way.”

(Johnson was hardly a blood-and-guts saber-rattler; the New York Times described him as a scholar who stirred controversy by contending that the United States was trying to use its military presence to gain control over the global economy at the expense of American democracy; one of his books was titled Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.)

Then and now, China’s claims are based upon the disputed ownership of a distant chain of tiny, thinly inhabited islands known as the Spratlys and another far-off chain known as the Paracels, that together occupy a very remote part of ocean. The Spratlys are made up of about 750 little bits of land—formations of rock that barely poke above the water at extreme low tide, atolls, cays, and full-blown islands—that lie due south of China and southeast of Vietnam. (The Paracels have fewer islands, in a more compact region, but with more landmass.) Both archipelagos have indications of reserves of natural gas and oil around them. Both countries fervently claim the island chains as their own, as do the governments of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia.

But China has been extending the size of its claims significantly, far beyond its shores, in some cases right up to the coasts of neighboring countries. In a new twist, the country’s leadership is using increasingly novel methods to nail down their claim.

Under international law, by staking its flag on a tiny dot of land, a country may hold title to all the ocean waters, shipping channels, seabeds, and their contents within a 200-mile radius. In the case of the tiny Paracel archipelago, ownership of a 3 square-mile landmass could theoretically lay the basis for a claim to the rights to about 5,800 square miles of ocean and the minerals beneath. Using similar logic, China says that 350,000 square miles surrounding the more spread-out Spratly island chain belong exclusively to China. Just as important as the mineral rights, controlling these specks of land means control of the South China Sea, the shipping gateway to East Asia.

With a resurgent and more belligerent China building a deep-water navy—and possibly supported by a newly developed Chinese missile, called the DF-21D, “built to strike a moving ship up to about 1,700 miles away,” according to the Wall Street Journal—these tiny island chains are becoming an increasing source of friction between that nation and its neighbors. There have been bloody clashes between China and Vietnam over this pair of archipelagos in the past few decades and standoffs between China and the Philippines.

And China has been steadily pushing for more territory. The country’s leadership has made hints in the past about projecting claims farther out into the Pacific to the “Second Island Chain”—which would even take in Guam, nearly 2,000 miles from Shanghai, and home to a huge US naval base, the US Pacific Fleet, and a US submarine squadron, among other military assets.

It all sounds a lot like the jockeying for position that occurred in the Pacific in the 1930s, when Japan was taking over similar atolls and the United States responded by sending in construction crews (and a detachment of Marines) to develop places such as Wake Island, ostensibly as refueling stops for Pan American Airways' flying boats. Later, Wake became a memorable battleground in the opening days of World War II.

In the latest development in the South China Sea competition, China is now trying to cement its claim to the Spratlys by hauling in millions of tons of rock and sand to create new land, at a cost of billions of dollars. So, for example, what was once a submerged reef in the Spratlys just below the waterline (Johnson South Reef) is now an island, occupied and claimed by China—and on which, the Philippine government says, China will build an air base, creating what would effectively be an unsinkable aircraft carrier and a new set of facts on the ground. (The proposed design of the Chinese military complex can be found in a Philippine newspaper.) Johnson South Reef is nearly 800 miles from the Chinese mainland; Vietnam and the Philippines are only about 200 miles away.

China is using this island-creating approach in multiple places; an extensive, in-depth BBC multimedia feature reporting from the Spratlys memorably describes the endeavor as “China’s Island Factory,” through which the Chinese hope to carve new ground. Literally.

Editor’s note: The full archive of Bulletin print issues—from 1945 to 1998 and complete with covers and other illustrations—is available here.

[SSridhar]

After border row, India, China plan counter-terror drills to build trust - Reuters

India will hold counter-terrorism exercises with China despite a recent face-off on their disputed border, officials said, in a sign the two governments want to manage their deep differences.

India, which under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has struck an assertive national security posture, also agreed to China's request to move next month's exercises away from the border with Pakistan with which China shares a close relationship.

The manoeuvres will come just weeks after thousands of Indian and Chinese soldiers confronted each other on their de facto border in the western Himalayas, accusing each other of building roads and observations posts in disputed territory.

"The exercises are a confidence-building measure, it is in everyone's interest," Jayadeva Ranade, the China specialist on India's National Security Advisory Board, said.

"It doesn't mean anyone is conceding anything."

The row in the Chumar sector of the Ladakh region erupted just as China's President Xi Jinping was visiting New Delhi for his first summit with Modi since the Indian leader's election in May. The leaders of the Asian giants aim to ramp up commercial ties.

India sees the anti-terrorism collaboration with China as a way to highlight the threat they both face from Islamist militants in Pakistan.

It had arranged for the Chinese to practise mock assaults in Bhatinda, about 110km from the Pakistan border.

Hot border

But last week China sought a change in the location of only the second such exercises after tension rose on the India-Pakistan border with the two sides exchanging fire, killing civilians.

"China had agreed to it initially, but then they opted for a change because the border got hot," said an Indian military source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The two armies will field 103 soldiers each for the "hand-in-hand" manoeuvres in Pune that involve scenarios such as recapturing a border post taken over by terrorists, the military source said.

"The India-China joint operations are meant to open a channel of communication between soldiers at the medium- and low-levels," said Srikanth Kondapalli, a China specialist Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"It builds a bit of trust, especially after the Chumar incident."

[RKumar]

India, China agree to defuse tensions - Suhasini Haider, The Hindu

Ahead of Mr. Xi’s visit to India, Mr. Doval travelled to Beijing as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy, and the announcement of his nomination as Special Representative was expected during the President’s visit. However, Chinese officials made it clear informally that Mr. Doval should have the Minister of State rank for the talks to continue.
hehehe ... It is not their business to whom India nominates. It is Indian diplomacy´s test by Chinese, to see how far they can push us. India should say, he is the one or just assign him the title.

Former NSAs Shivshankar Menon and M.K. Narayanan were both of that rank. Upset with China’s rebuff, New Delhi is learnt to have put off the announcement.
Non of them should be nominated as both them are/were very close to Congress.

[khan]

X-post China's Prez Xi's visit to India: Why Modi and India came out on top

[SSridhar]

Despite Chinese concern, India to go ahead with its plan of construction of frontier highway in Arunachal Pradesh : Rijiju

With China expressing concern over India's plan to construct frontier highway along the McMohan line in Arunachal Pradesh, Union minister of state for Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju said that the India has all the right to create critical infrastructure in its area.

The minister also informed that government will relax rules in the restricted area permit (RAP) for encouraging tourism in different pockets of Northeast India.

Rijiju who was in Guwahati to participate in a programme of PHD chamber of commerce said, "We are at freedom to construct highway in our territory. We are not harming neighbours interest. We have to develop our territories, especially those areas which are neglected for too long time. We are going to develop our own region."

India plans to construct roads linking Mago-Thingbu in Tawang to Vijaynagar in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh. The 2,000-km long road is expected t cost Rs 40,000 crore. India plans frontier highway in its border. Northeast India shares border with China, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar.

The minister said, "We are not venturing into others territory. Its is our domain. Other countries should not have any objection when we are not doing anything harmful to them," Rijiju said.

He continued, "We are not doing anything which is adverse to the interest of our neighbours. Whatever is being done, it is for our own people and for the connectivity of our own people living in border areas."

China sharply reacted to India's plans to construct a road network along the McMohan line inArunachal Pradesh and expressed hope that India will not take any action which may complicate the situation before a final settlement is reached to end the boundary dispute.

The MHA will relax the Restricted area permit for some pockets in Northeast India which required by foreigners to visit certain parts of North East. "We have decided to relax the norms of Protected Area Permit. I have discussed it with my senior ministers,. The foreign affairs department of his ministry is working on it."

"Relaxation of visa, permission to travel from one place to another in North East and any other issues, you will get all support from us to promote tourism in the region. However, the relaxation will not be a blanket one for the entire region."

[SSridhar]

Japan's new security policy to help 'close friends': Envoy - PTI, ET

Japanese Ambassador to India Takeshi Yagi today said that the country's new security policy would help 'close friends' like India if the need arises.

Speaking at a seminar organised by Observer Research Foundation, he said that Japan's new security policy enabling its military might to expand its operational range had attracted criticism from other countries.

The ambassador said that the new policy on security does not tantamount to return to militarisation.

"We will stick to the path of peace," he said. Referring to the recent visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Japan, the ambassador said the bilateral ties between the two countries encompassing all the aspects would receive a great boost, particularly in defence.

He also said that both India and Japan could play a significant role in the Indo-Pacific regional cooperation.

X-Posted here for obvious reasons.

[SSridhar]

Western sanctions force Russia to aid China’s rise; Beijing may acquire advanced weapons - Japan Times

Defying his former enemies in the United States and Europe may force Russian President Vladimir Putin to aid the ascent of his biggest rival in the east.

Isolated over Ukraine, Russia is relying on China for the investment it needs to avert a recession, three people involved in policy planning said. This means caving in to pressure to grant China privileged access to the two things it wants most: raw materials and advanced weapons.

Russia’s growing dependence on China, which it battled for decades for control over global communism, may end up strengthening its neighbor’s position in the Pacific while hastening its own economic decline. With the ruble near a record low and foreign investment disappearing, luring Chinese cash may deepen Russia’s reliance on natural resources and derail government efforts to diversify the economy.

“Now that Putin has turned away from the West and toward the East, China is drawing maximum profit from Russian necessity,” said Masha Lipman, an independent political analyst in Moscow who co-authored a study on Putin with former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul.

China is wasting no time filling the void created by the closing of U.S. and European debt markets to Russia’s largest borrowers. A Chinese delegation led by Premier Li Keqiang signed a package of deals last Monday in Moscow in areas including energy and finance. Among the accords were a three-year, 150 billion yuan ($24.5 billion) currency swap deal, a double-tax treaty, cooperation in satellite-navigation and high-speed rail, and an agreement on implementing a May natural gas contract.

China’s Export-Import Bank signed framework deals with VTB Group and Vnesheconombank, Russia’s development bank, and a trade financing agreement with Russian Agricultural Bank. The Russian state-controlled banks are subject to sanctions.

Li’s three-day visit “will inject new impetus to the development of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership,” Vice Foreign Minister Cheng Guoping told CCTV.

Russia’s embrace of China reflects a vulnerability that the country hasn’t experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which triggered a depression that fractured society and led to the emergence of oligarchs who were often at odds with the state. Unlike 1991, Russians now are united in support of their leader and, with $455 billion in foreign currency and gold reserves, the country isn’t broke, according to Lipman.

“The economy was much worse then, but Russia was in a much better position geopolitically because it had the support of the U.S. and Europe,” Lipman said. “Now that Putin has opted for confrontation, he’s been left without allies. China is totally unsentimental and pragmatic.”

The deepening ties between two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council may reverberate beyond the region as Putin moves to meet one of China’s key military goals: acquiring cutting-edge technology.

Russia is preparing to sign contracts for the delivery of S-400 missile systems and Su-35 fighter jets to its fellow nuclear state as early as the first quarter of next year, said Vasily Kashin, a China expert at the Center of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow. Russia may also supply China with its newest submarine, the Amur 1650, and components for products such as nuclear-powered satellites, Kashin said.

This may trigger a conventional arms race in East Asia, said Omar Lamrani, a military analyst at Stratfor, a U.S. geopolitical risk analysis company.

“Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam are already worried about the Chinese developing their military, and those concerns will only increase if China gets this Russian equipment,” Lamrani said.

The S-400, which only Russia currently uses, would extend China’s reach to encompass all of Taiwan’s airspace. The Su-35 would allow the Chinese to use the technology to expand their air force, Lamrani said. While Russia has been a major arms supplier to China for decades, it has withheld its best systems until now because China often uses reverse engineering to create competing knockoffs and swell its arsenal, he said.

Russia has long been reluctant to further empower a neighbor that already has four times the economic output and almost 10 times the population. Sanctions changed all that, and Putin now risks becoming the junior partner, a role he is not used to, said Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Moscow-based Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, an adviser to the government.

Even with his options limited globally, Putin’s power remains practically unlimited at home. His approval rating is hovering near a high of almost 90 percent, and confidence in the military is at a post-Soviet peak.

Still, China has already achieved a strategic objective: Russian gas supplies. Putin ended more than a decade of talks by striking a $400 billion, 30-year accord during a summit in China in May. Putin called the deal between state-run OAO Gazprom and its Chinese partners “epochal.”

Putin’s courtship

A sign of the importance Putin is placing on his renewed courtship of China, which condemned the sanctions, is the appointment of one of his most trusted allies, billionaire Gennady Timchenko, to the head of the Russia-China Business Council. The announcement was made on April 29, a day after the U.S. blacklisted more than a dozen companies linked to Timchenko, who was personally sanctioned by the U.S. in March.

“Attitudes toward the Chinese have become more serious and friendly” since the start of the Ukraine conflict, said Timchenko’s predecessor at the council, Boris Titov, the government’s ombudsman for the rights of businesses.

Broadening commercial links with China, which overtook Germany as Russia’s largest trading partner in 2011, was vital for Russia even before the separatist war in Ukraine, but it became a matter of urgency after the U.S. and the European Union closed their debt markets to Russia, Titov said.

Before the sanctions, Russia kept tight control over Chinese investments, with the biggest being overseen by people with direct access to Putin, such as Timchenko.

New deals

Last year, China acquired 12.5 percent of Russia’s OAO Uralkali, the biggest producer of potash, and China National Petroleum Corp. agreed to prepay OAO Rosneft about $70 billion as part of a $270 billion, 25-year supply deal. That was followed by Rosneft’s $85 billion, 10-year accord with China Petrochemical Corp. and CNPC’s purchase of 20 percent of an Arctic gas project from OAO Novatek for an undisclosed sum.

All of these contracts involved members of Putin’s inner circle. Uralkali’s chairman, Sergey Chemezov, has known Putin at least since the 1980s, when they lived in the same complex in Dresden, Germany, when the future president was a KGB agent. Novatek is partly owned by Timchenko. And Rosneft is run by Igor Sechin, who has worked for Putin for two decades.

Earlier this year, though, as companies became more desperate for cash, Russia started lifting restrictions to offer the Chinese a wider pool of potential investments, although it continued to shield certain projects involving gold, platinum-group metals, diamonds and high technology, two senior government officials said in May.
Barriers lifted

“Some fairly serious barriers were lifted after the conflict in Ukraine started,” Titov said.

Putin’s charm offensive appears to be working in China, where state media praise his defiance of the U.S. A Pew Research Center poll in July found 66 percent of Chinese had a favorable view of Russia, up from 49 percent a year earlier and the most of 44 nations polled after Vietnam and Russia itself. Russian state television reciprocated last month by accusing the U.S. of fomenting protests that paralyzed Hong Kong.

When Putin came to power in 2000, Russia imported less than $1 billion of Chinese goods a year while exporting almost $6 billion. That surplus has turned into a deficit, with Chinese imports reaching a record $53 billion last year, compared with less than $40 billion of Russian goods going the other way.

Personal touch

For Putin, the China relationship is becoming increasingly personal. He has met with his counterpart, Xi Jinping, nine times since Xi’s promotion last year.

“Our relations are the best among the great powers,” Xi told students in Moscow in March 2013 during his first foreign trip as president. That bond “guarantees” world peace, he said.

The two leaders are also working in tandem on efforts to curb the dominance of the dollar in the global financial system.

Yuan transactions on the Moscow Exchange, the first bourse outside of China to offer regulated trading in the currency, jumped 50 percent in September from August to the equivalent of $1.1 billion. Though still tiny compared with the $367 billion in dollar-for-ruble sales in August, importers now pay for 8 percent of all Chinese goods with yuan instead of dollars, up from 2 percent four years ago.

Crude rubles

Those volumes will rise exponentially if Russia decides, as it is now debating, to accept yuan under Gazprom’s $400 billion gas contract, according to four senior officials and executives.

China, too, is starting to move away from dollars in its trade with Russia. Gazprom’s oil arm, OAO Gazprom Neft, has started selling crude to China for rubles, Putin said Oct. 2.

Still, convincing the Chinese to switch more of their settlements to rubles is an uphill battle after the currency sank 14 percent against the dollar last quarter, the most among global currencies. The central bank’s currency and gold reserves have fallen by more than $50 billion this year, in part due to efforts to defend the currency.

The Chinese remain primarily interested in raw materials and not in helping Russia diversify its economy, according to Alexei Maslov, head of the Asian Studies School at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

‘Taking advantage’

“A top priority is to diversify trade, because 70 percent of exports are raw materials,” Maslov said. “We want to cut this share, but China is not interested.”

China so far has little incentive to cater to Russia’s wishes. While Putin expects bilateral trade to grow from about $90 billion last year to more than $100 billion next year, that would still only represent just 2 percent of China’s global trade and a fifth of U.S.-Chinese flows, according to Maslov.

The Chinese are tough and patient investors who sense Russia’s increasing need for money and are holding out for major acquisitions, according to Maslov. China accounted for just 2.5 percent, or $3 billion, of total foreign investment in Russia last year, he said.

“They’re taking advantage of the situation,” Maslov said. “There used to be a Western alternative, but now there isn’t, so China is using its uncontested position.”

Titov, the ombudsman, said one of the barriers to deeper ties with China is cultural.

Russians are used to the U.S. and European corporate style, with lawyers who draw up “rock-solid” contracts, while the Chinese don’t rely as much on written pledges, Titov said.

Chinese expansion

“We’ll have to learn new many new things in dealing with the Chinese,” Titov said.

Whichever way China’s corporate style is characterized, it has clearly been more successful than Russia’s.

In 1979, at the start of Deng Xiaoping’s overhaul of the economy, China’s output was 40 percent of that of the Soviet Russian Republic — the present-day Russian Federation, according to a study by the Center for European Reform. By 2010, it was four-times larger.

That disparity gives Xi the upper hand over Putin, who, with few options left, will have to keep making concessions to China, according to Ja Ian Chong, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore.

“Russia is only important to Asia for two reasons: energy supplies and arms sales,” said Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. “And even though Russia-China relations are strengthening, it is more a marriage of convenience than a love match, with suspicions on both sides.”

[Peregrine]

22 believed killed in attack in China's Xinjiang region

BEIJING: At least 22 people have been killed in a violent attack in Bachu of the disturbed Kashgar area of Xinjiang, the US based Radio Free Asia said quoting three local police officers and eyewitnesses. But the incident has not yet been confirmed by official sources.

"According to brief notice I received, a total of 22 people were killed, including the four attackers, but I have no idea how many police officers were among the 18 (victims)," RFA's Uyghur news service quoted Qahar Ayup, the chief of the Chongqurchaq police station, as saying.

If true, the incident is expected to make it difficult for Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is due to visit Beijing next month, to continue to assure China of his determination to keep Taliban influence out of its borders.

Chinese officials have been consistently asking Islamabad to ensure that the links between Xinjiang's Islamic terrorists and Pakistan based Taliban is cut off. Sources said Beijing is more interested in ensuring safety within its border than worrying about Pakistan's border clashes with Indian forces.

RFA cited two other local police officers saying that the bloodshed occurred at a farmers' market after four Uyghur militants attacked the local people on October 12.

"The four men arrived in two motorcycles at the farmers' market at 10:30am. Two of them attacked police officers patrolling the street while the other two attacked the Han Chinese stall owners who were just entering the market to open their stores," Hashim Eli, a police officer at the Konabazar police station, told RFA.

It quoted Eli saying that, "Most of the business owners in the market were Han Chinese," Eli said. "The attackers carefully planned the attack to ensure that there were no Uyghur customers in the market."

The incident took place a day before a court in Kashgar prefecture sentenced to death 12 people, all believed to be Uyghurs, on charges of killing 37 people in July, state media reported.

"It's true we have placed the city on red alert after the violence in Maralbeshi (another name of Bachu," RFA cited Obul Yasin, a police officer in neighboring Tumshuk (in Chinese, Tumushuke) city.

"An emergency meeting has been held by Tumshuk City Police department and we have taken steps to prepare for any possible attacks here," he said.

Cheers

[SSridhar]

Fire-crackers: Centre issues another warning - Business Line

The Government has issued a second warning this year against illegal import of fire-crackers into the country, as Chinese items continue to be smuggled despite restrictions.

The first such statement was issued by the Commerce Ministry in September.

Public participation

The help of the general public to identify outlets and individuals selling such fire-crackers has also been sought in a statement issued by the Ministry.

“It has been brought to the notice of the Government that fireworks of foreign origin are being illegally brought into India under false declarations,” the statement said.

Fireworks are categorised as restricted items in India, which means that a special licence has to be obtained for their import.

No import licence has been granted for fireworks till date, the Ministry said. Various fireworks associations have informed the Commerce Ministry that smuggled fireworks are flooding the Indian market this Diwali and such items contain potassium chlorate, a dangerous and hazardous chemical, which can ignite or explode spontaneously, the release said.

“The general public and stakeholders are requested that information about possession or sale of such fireworks may be reported to the nearest police station or district authorities for suitable action,” the statement said.

I am glad that the present government has taken this issue seriously. There is a real danger of these Chinese products destroying the lives of lakhs of people who are engaged in this industry in southern TN districts.

[member_19686]

2014.10.10 (Fri)
NOVEMBER MAYORAL ELECTIONS: MOMENT OF TRUTH FOR TAIWAN
　　　The spacious reception hall at a hotel in central Tokyo was filled with great excitement last weekend as Taiwanese residents in Japan hosted a gathering in support of a popular physician running in the Taipei mayoral election scheduled for November 29.

　　　Reform of Taiwan must start from changes within the capital city of Taipei, asserted Dr. Ko Wen-je (55) as he spoke passionately to his supporters, stressing that Taiwanese must secure their identity as Taiwanese and repossess their indigenous culture and values. Ko’s plea is a challenge to the changes that have been forced on the education system by the Kuomintang’s President Ma Ying-jeou, who has steadily been pushing the nation towards China while eliminating all traces of Taiwan’s traditions and the legacy of the colonial Japanese education system.

　　　Preaching the importance of efforts to identify with Taiwan as their motherland, Ko has received significant support in various opinion polls across Taiwan. Ms. Kim Bi-Ling, who once fought for Taiwan’s independence and has since become a naturalized Japanese citizen, introduces Ko as follows:

　　　“When I asked him why he has given up his affluent life as a successful physician to go into politics, he replied that he simply could not suppress his strong love for Taiwan, his motherland, and that he made up his mind to devote the rest of his life to his country.”

　　　Her remarks prompted me to recall the words of Aritsune (Koson) Fukuda, the late playwright and literary critic, who once remarked that he asked himself why he loved Japan and realized that he was perfectly content with the thought that “I was destined to love my motherland.”

　　　The coming Taipei mayoral election—part of a cluster of nationwide local elections constituting a prelude to the 2016 general elections—is extremely important for Taiwan’s future, notes Koh Sekai, who was chief representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Tokyo (2004-2008) under the administration of the Democratic Progress Party (DPP).

　　　“Ten years ago, there were mayoral elections in the five major cities of Taiwan—Taipei, New Taipei City, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung—accounting for 13 million (57%) out of the 23 million population in Taiwan,” explains Koh. “The ruling party got the better of the DPP in three of these cities, but the latter did better in terms of the percentage of votes—50% against 45%. Sure enough, the TMT barely was victorious, and now hardly any Taiwanese supports the Ma administration. It’s the DPP’s turn to claim victory so Taiwanese can really join hands in launching the task of transforming Taiwan into a nation worth its true self.”

Truth about China’s “One-Nation, Two-System” Scheme

　　　Seven years after assuming office, the Ma administration is a political lame duck in its second term, its approval rating having slipped to barely 9%. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s dependence on the Chinese economy continues to grow. Observes Koh:

　　　“Hillary Clinton once expressed her concern to Taiwanese business leaders about being too dependent on the Chinese economy. Many of us are also seriously alarmed about Taiwan being one day totally overtaken and incapacitated by the Chinese economy.”

　　　The situation in today’s Taiwan is a golden opportunity as far as Beijing is concerned. At the Great Hall of the People on September 26 President Xi Jinping received a delegation of pro-unification Taiwanese groups, including Yok Mu-ming, who heads the opposition New Party, reportedly declaring: “‘One country, two systems’ is the best way to realize a peaceful national unification.”

　　　Incidentally, the New Party, formed out of a split from the KMT in 1993, is a center-right conservative minority party which started with only six seats in the parliament.

　　　In his talk with Yok, Xi was also quoted as describing the China-Taiwan relationship as facing “a new situation with new problems”—a statement that Koh criticizes.

　　　“Although Xi himself claims the ‘one country, two-system’ scheme is the best way for unification,” argues Koh, “the truth of the matter is that no Taiwanese is longing for unification. We desire to maintain the present status quo; in other words, we strongly desire to maintain Taiwan’s status as an independent state for good. Unification is, therefore, absolutely out of the question. Xi also said that he is concerned about our ‘new situation with new problems,’ which I assume was a reference to the Sunflower Student Movement—the protest movement driven by a coalition of students and civil groups that took place last March and April. However, this movement had the broad support of the people of Taiwan—very much an expression of the democratic will of the people—and we view Xi’s characterization of this movement as absolutely incompatible with your values.”

　　　Reflecting bitter opposition from the general populace, angry student demonstrations erupted on March 18 in protest against President Ma’s signing of the Cross-Straits Service Trade Agreement, whose objective is to liberalize trade in services between Taiwan and China.

　　　Under the terms of the agreement, service industries—such as banking, health care, and telecommunications—will be opened to investment. Its opponents see it as designed to implement a fundamental economic consolidation between China and Taiwan, regarding the “two Chinas” as one. If the Taiwanese economy becomes a part of China’s economic sphere, it could be easily overwhelmed by the huge Chinese market. Beyond that lies a complete unification of Taiwan with China—both in name and reality. In short, the Sunflower Movement constituted a strong protest against the trade agreement by members of Taiwan’s younger generation who recognized the agreement as the first step toward eventual unification with China.

　　　China regards the unstable situation in Taiwan under the Ma administration as a fine opportunity to lay a more concrete foundation for future unification. Presumably, that is why Xi referred to a “one country, two-system” scheme for Taiwan for the first time since becoming the Chinese head of state in November 2012. Hong Kong’s present situation shows exactly what will inevitably happen when China’s “one country, two-system” game plan is implemented.

　　　Exactly 30 years ago, in 1984, the United Kingdom and China provisionally signed the Agreement on the Transfer of Sovereignty over Hong Kong. It took effect 13 years later, in 1997. The reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China was to be made under an international agreement that would keep Hong Kong’s system of democracy intact under a “one country, two-system” scheme for the first 50 years.

Typical Chinese Modus Operandi

　　　What is actually taking place in Hong Kong today is a manifest violation of that international agreement and a suppression of the former crown colony’s democratic system. China’s efforts to undermine Hong Kong’s high level of autonomy has intensified since the Xi administration was inaugurated. Most significantly, when Leung Chun-ying became Chief Executive of the Executive Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the spring of 2012, he was selected by an election administration commission backed by the Chinese Communist Party. Leung’s appointment marked the first deliberate step towards political control over Hong Kong by the Communist Party.

　　　Following Xi’s wishes, Leung has worked out an election policy that will critically affect Hong Kong’s autonomy. While promising full and free election from 2017 on, Leung’s new policy will enable the CPC to pre-select the candidates for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, making it impossible in actuality for democratic candidates to run. This means that Hong Kong will sooner rather than later be thoroughly incorporated into the political framework of the CPC. Only 17 years after regaining Hong Kong’s sovereignty, China is already abandoning its pledge.

　　　This is a typical Chinese modus operandi—ducking immediate issues with honeyed words, steadily intensifying control by playing for time. We know, because Japan has also been subjected to these tactics by the Chinese.

　　　Tokyo signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with China in 1978, normalizing bilateral relations severed by the war. Although Deng Xiao-ping once said Japan and China had agreed to shelve any issues pertaining to the Senkaku Islands, no such agreement actually exists. For a number of years after 1978, The Chinese continued to maintain that “territorial issues should be shelved” and that the Senkaku issue should be resolved peacefully by later generations of Japanese and Chinese—all the while continuing to receive hefty official development aid (ODA) from Tokyo. Then, 14 years later, in 1992, the Chinese arbitrarily instituted a new law, declaring the Senkakus Chinese territory. And now, their patrol ships violate the Japanese territorial waters around the Senkakus on almost a daily basis in an attempt to implement effective control over the unmanned islands.

　　　China has already violated its pledge, made only 17 years ago, that Hong Kong’s “one country, two-system” scheme would remain intact for 50 years. Clearly, the best policy for Taiwanese is not to put faith in what Xi has to say about the “one country, two-system” scheme for Taiwan—although what exactly he means by this is ambiguous at best.

　　　The CPC stands like an insurmountable wall blocking the way of those Taiwanese, including mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je, who are desperately challenging China’s interference with Taiwan’s politics. I wish them the best of luck from the bottom of my heart.

(Translated from “Renaissance Japan” column no. 625 in the October 9, 2014 issue of The Weekly Shincho)

http://en.yoshiko-sakurai.jp/2014/10/10/6343

[SSridhar]

India, China agree to step up military interaction - Atul Aneja, The Hindu

India and China have agreed to take solid steps to improve border management, including the establishment of a hotline between the two Army headquarters and designating additional border posts for meetings between local commanders.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying disclosed on Monday that both countries have decided to step up military-to military interaction during last week’s Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) held in New Delhi.

Consensus

She said that during their meetings that commenced on October 16, the two delegations reached a broad consensus on steps that would yield peace and stability in the border areas, following candid, amicable and constructive consultations.

“Both sides agreed to establish a regular meeting mechanism between the two military headquarters of neighbouring military areas and border troops, set up new meeting posts in the border areas and have hotlines between military headquarters,” the spokesperson observed. Analysts say the decision will intensify communications between the two militaries, and provide a better institutional framework for border management. However, this is an incremental step, and talks on clarification of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) or towards a final border settlement are yet to surface on the agenda. Ms. Hua said the consensus is a demonstration of strong political will and positive attitude by the two countries in tackling their differences, and safeguarding stability of border through cooperation.

[SSridhar]

NSA Ajit Doval spells out government policy.
Link - PTI

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval also emphasised that India wants to have friendly relations with an economically-growing China without compromising on territorial sovereignity.

Delivering an address on "The Munich Security Conference" (MSC) here, he emphasised the policy of having friendly relations with all neighbours and said India's economic progress could bring the regional countries together.

"I think developing better relations with neighbourhood is important. India's economic development could bind together the region which could see a vested interest that India's growth will bring more opportunities and they should not feel undermined," he said.

Turning to China whose troops have been indulging in incursions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC), he said India considers it as "a very important neighbour" with with "we have had good relations for centuries".

Observing that there had been "some bad experience in 1962 (when China waged war)", the NSA said, "But we find space for economic cooperation and commerce. I would like to develop our relations to such an extent till the time our territorial and integral sovereignty...we would not able to compromise on it. We should sit together and resolve our boundary dispute amicably."

[chaanakya]

ड्रैगन से मुकाबले की तैयारी: चीन से सटी सीमा पर भारत बिछाएगा चार रेल लाइनें
Govt give approval for laying four railway lines along India China Border.

नई दिल्ली........सरकार ने चीन से सटी सीमा के नजदीक चार रेल लाइनें बिछाने का फैसला किया है। इसके लिए रेलवे को सर्वे करने का निर्देश दिया गया है। ये रेल लाइनें रणनीतिक तौर पर अहम मानी जा रही हैं। ये चार रेल लाइनें उन 14 रेल लाइनों का हिस्सा होंगी, जिनका भारत की फौज रणनीतिक इस्तेमाल करेगी।

Govt has decided to lay four railway lines along India China Border. Railways has been directed to conduct the survey. These Rail Lines are being considered strategically important . These four rail lines would be part of 14 rail lines which will be used bu India Army.
इन रेल लाइनों की कुल लंबाई करीब एक हजार किलोमीटर होगी। इनका विस्तार अरुणाचल प्रदेश, असम, हिमाचल प्रदेश और जम्मू-कश्मीर में होगा। रेलवे को इन रेल लाइनों को बिछाने के लिए किए जाने वाले सर्वे के खर्च का आकलन करने के लिए अगले महीने तक का वक्त दिया गया है। बताया जा रहा है कि इंजीनियरिंग सर्वे का ही खर्च करीब 200 करोड़ रुपए हो सकता है।

Total lenght of these rail lines would be abt 1000 Kms covering Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, J&K. Railways is give time tof one month for preparation of Estimates for conducting survey. Approximately Rs 200 crores would be required for Engineering survey.
कहां बिछेंगी रेल लाइनें
मिसामारी-तवांग 378 किलोेमीटर Misamari-Tawang 378 Kms
असम-अरुणाचल प्रदेश, उत्तरी लखीमपुर-सिलापथर-248 किलोमीटर Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, North lakhimpur , Silapathar 248 Kms
असम-अरुणाचल प्रदेश, मुरकोंगसेलेक-पासीघाट-तेजू-परशुराम कुंड-रुपई-256 किलोमीटर Assam Arunachal Pradesh Murkongselek, Pasighat,Tezu,Parashuram Kund, Rupai 256 Kms
हिमाचल प्रदेश-जम्मू एवं कश्मीर, बिलासपुर-मंडी-मनाली-लेह 498 किलोमीटर HI, J&K, Bilaspur mandi manali Leh 498 Km

कितना वक्त लगेगा
सर्वे को पूरा करने में करीब दो साल का वक्त लग सकता है। ये सभी रेल लाइनें हिमालय के आसपास ही बिछेंगी, इसलिए पूरी कवायद के दौरान पहाड़ में कई सुरंगें खोदनी
होंगी।

Two years would be required to complete the survey. As these lines would be paid along Himalayas and several tunnels are also required for the whole exercise.

[SSridhar]

Hi-tech surveillance cameras to help security forces zoom in on China - Deeptiman Tiwary, ToI

In the wake of increasing Chinese aggression and the difficulty of physically manning the vast India-China border, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) is acquiring high-end surveillance cameras that can see over 20 km deep into Chinese territory. One such camera has been installed at a border outpost (BoP) in Leh and at least 50 more are in the pipeline.{Didn't PLA take away one such camera in Chumar in 2013 and then return it broken ?}

The acquisition is part of a largescale revamp in China border security infrastructure being undertaken by the government following frequent Chinese incursions in the past couple of years, the latest being over fortnight-long faceoffs in Demchok and Chumar areas of Ladakh last month. Government is already in the process of acquiring vehicles and choppers for the force.

Stressing on the need for greater infrastructure, ITBP DG Subhash Goswami said, "China has become more aggressive in the recent past. Its protests against Indian road building exercises have become more vociferous. Perhaps, it is reacting to India aggressively improving infrastructure along the border."

On the installation of cameras, Goswami said, "We are fully ready to face any challenge from China. Our boys are well trained and equipped. However, we would like to have more surveillance equipment. We can't have boots everywhere. We have installed a state-of-the-art surveillance camera at Thakung post (north of Chushul) and it can see 20-22 km ahead. We are asking government for more such equipment."

Sources said the camera is equipped for thermal imaging as well and thus can see at night too. The footage from the camera recorded over a period of 10 days would be analyzed to gauge the pattern of Chinese troop movement or infrastructure buildup. Sources said at least 50 BoPs in Ladakh could be given such cameras.

Sources said there are also long-term plans for laying optical fibres {Why should optical fibre connectivity be a 'long term' plan?} along the border. As and when that happens, cameras could be connected to BoPs and eventually with headquarters in Delhi for real time monitoring of the border. There is already a plan afoot to have wireless area network in all BoPs.

The ITBP DG also said two of the 27 proposed roads on the border had been completed are were functioning well. He said the force had also started electronic procurement of its requirements and this had not only brought transparency but also reduced cost and widened the playing field. "We now have 100% e-procurement. This has brought prices of goods down by 20%," Goswami said.

The DG revealed the information during ITBP's annual press conference. He also denied reports of ITBP coming under Army's operational control. "I have not heard of any such thing," he said.

The DG also raised a red flag on health hazards of working at high altitudes and hinted at the force needing to have reserve battalions. "We have 100% deployment. So rotation (from difficult posting to peace posting) becomes difficult. Given the conditions in which our jawans function, it has an impact on their health. Only recently, 20 jawans died of heart attack," said Goswami.

[SSridhar]

From NightWatch for the night of Oct 22, 2014

China: The ongoing Chinese reclamation project at Fiery Cross Reef has made it the largest island in the Spratly Islands and work continues. Historically, Itu Aba, which is occupied by forces from Taiwan, was the largest island with an area of .half a square kilometer. It also is the only island with fresh water. Fiery Cross Reef now measures one square kilometer.

Comment: Fiery Cross Reef is about 750 miles from China, highlighting the need for a distant base to support commercial and military activities in the Spratly Islands.

Taiwan's intelligence reported that Beijing was engaged in seven construction projects in the South China Sea, with five of them reportedly having been approved since Xi Jinping became President. The Chinese apparently intend to build a network of islets for protecting their territorial sea and seabed claims.

China is simply occupying uninhabited islets and enlarging them to serve as military outposts far flung from Mainland China to stake their claim for SCS. This is a fraud but nobody is able to do anything to stop this. We must learn a lesson here.

[Philip]

http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/chinas-n ... s-in-asia/


The PLA already contests maritime Asia with the United States.

China's Navy Is Already Challenging the US in Asia

By James R. Holmes
October 16, 2014

Korea-based magazine Global Asia is back with an issue on the geopolitics of Asia. Featured are articles from well-known commentators such as Boston College professor Robert Ross and diplomatic historian extraordinaire Walter Russell Mead. It’s a refreshing read for anyone fascinated by the bareknuckles interactions that ensue when political calculations meet human passions meet geographic facts of life. The Naval Diplomat was jazzed after browsing through.

But (And you knew a but was coming) let me zero in on Professor Ross, who lodges several misleading claims in his tour d’horizon of geopolitical competition in Asia. For one, he starts a discussion of naval trends in the region by contending that the “Chinese Navy cannot yet challenge the U.S. in maritime East Asia.” Really? The People’s Liberation Army, including its seagoing arm, has been mounting a challenge against the U.S. Navy for some years now. It clearly can if it already is. Whether its challenge will succeed remains to be determined. Either way, long-term strategic competition has been joined.

Now, it may be that Chinese sea power—meaning not just the PLA Navy but the shore-based component of Chinese maritime strategy, manifest in land-based anti-ship missiles and tactical aircraft flying from airfields ashore—cannot yet defeat the American naval contingent forward-deployed to Asia in a pitched battle. In a sense, though, that’s beside the point. Four decades back Edward Luttwak affirmed that peacetime “naval suasion” is more about optics than slugging it out with enemy fleets. It’s about displaying ships, warplanes, and armaments in a manner that convinces important audiences your navy would triumph in combat on the high seas.

Armed persuasion, then, is about managing perceptions. Physical implements are implements of political discourse. In other words, writes Luttwak, whoever a critical mass of observers thinks would have won an actual battle does win in peacetime encounters, where rival forces face off without actually exchanging fire. Appearances sway observers one way or the other. Perception is king. Outwardly impressive ships, aircraft, and weaponry can make an outsized impression on lay audiences—potentially skewing the results of a peacetime showdown in favor of the lesser contender. To wit, China.

Should China’s navy square off against America’s, moreover, it could prevail by threatening to do massive damage—even in a losing cause. Think about it. Washington is finding it hard to keep up the U.S. Navy’s size—even in a peacetime setting, when ships aren’t being disabled or sunk. What if the fleet suffered heavy losses in combat, and had to replace lost ships, aircraft, and munitions afterward? How much of its navy can America lose and remain a superpower? How fast could the navy regenerate strength, and where would the extra money come from? If U.S. leaders were asking themselves such questions going in, they might hesitate at a critical moment—or forego a worthy effort altogether. That’s deterrence, and a way a weaker foe can successfully challenge the strong. So much for the PLA’s being utterly outclassed at sea.

Bottom line, let’s not succumb to hubris.

Now on to tactical and force-structure matters. Nitpicking, you say? Nope. As strategic big kahuna Carl von Clausewitz vouchsafed two centuries ago, it takes resounding tactical success to yield resounding strategic success. Getting hardware and tactics wrong, conversely, can confound strategy and geopolitics.

So the technical dimension is worth belaboring. Ross maintains that “China has yet to develop an anti-ship ballistic missile capability, which may ultimately be unachievable.” The PLA hasn’t developed an ASBM? Why, yes, it has. Now, whether PLA rocketeers have made that bird into a working implement of war remains an open question four years after it reached initial operating capability. Best we know, the ASBM has yet to undergo testing under battle conditions. That shortfall indeed casts doubt on its efficacy. But dismissing the ASBM outright is premature—which is why the Pentagon’s annual reports on Chinese military power routinely draw attention to it, and why U.S. Navy mariners fret about it.

Next, Ross claims that the PLA Navy’s submarine force is “quite small” relative to the U.S. Navy’s. Quite small? By what standard? The naval balance is a relative thing, and your opponent is the yardstick. GlobalSecurity.org projects that China will field 70 subs in 2020, 63 of them nuclear or diesel attack boats. That number will remain on the upswing if recent history is any indication. And the PLA Navy is fast ridding itself of noisy, obsolescent Cold War-vintage junk as it modernizes. The U.S. Navy, by contrast, fields 73 submarines today. Imposing, eh? Of that total, though, 18 are Ohio-class boats. Of those, 14 “boomers,” or ballistic-missiles subs, comprise the undersea leg of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The remaining 4 have been fitted with large numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles for land-attack missions. The Ohios are not platforms that fight for maritime command.

Subtracting them from the total leaves the U.S. Navy with 55 nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs. But wait. Only about 33 boats, or 60 percent of the U.S. sub fleet, call the Asia-Pacific home under the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. Meanwhile, the entire PLA Navy sub force is concentrated in the region (with the exception of one diesel boat currently plying the Indian Ocean). And it’s concentrated in a subset of that region, mainly the China seas.

As it turns out, then, Ross’s “quite small” Chinese fleet outnumbers the U.S. Pacific Fleet sub force by a wide margin in the waters that count—already. That brute numerical disparity will widen. The American fleet is set to dwindle as low as 42 by the mid-2020s as shipbuilding budgets flatline—at best—while construction costs rise. And it gets worse. The 2020s is a decade when new-construction ballistic-missile subs—replacements for the Ohio class—threaten to crowd out not just SSN construction but all other navy programs. Amphibian pundit CDR Salamander dubs this looming acquisition debacle the Terrible Twenties.

Ergo, it’s doubtful SSN numbers will recover any time soon. Do the math: in 2025 or thereabouts—assuming the pivot remains in force, and with it the mandate to allocate 60 percent of naval forces to the Pacific Fleet—the U.S. Navy will deploy 25 or 26 subs to face off against upwards of 60 Chinese diesel and nuclear attack boats. But even those figures project an optimistic view of the undersea balance, since they rest on the dubious assumption that Washington will concentrate the entire Pacific sub force in East Asia—neglecting important expanses such as the Indian Ocean and Eastern Pacific. The mismatch in numbers is likely to persist and grow. If China possesses a small undersea force, what does Ross consider a big one?

But aren’t American SSNs virtually omnipotent? Yes and no. Yes, once they close to weapons range. No, because they have to get close to fire. U.S. Navy boats rely on torpedoes to assail enemy shipping. That means they need to approach within roughly 10 nautical miles of their prey. Sketch a circle on the map with a 20-mile diameter centered on a hypothetical sub’s position, and you’ll see that’s not a lot of geographic coverage per boat. American SSNs can launch cruise missiles, to be sure, but their Tomahawks are for hitting targets ashore, not enemy surface fleets. Fighting for control of the sea is a relative afterthought.

U.S. boats’ Chinese counterparts, by contrast, are armed not just with torpedoes but with anti-ship cruise missiles—weapons capable of pummeling surface ships scores of miles away. That’s what you call reach. The true picture, in short, is far blurrier than the one Ross paints. Beijing fields inferior boats. But it fields lots of them, and it has the luxury of massing the whole fleet in the China seas and Western Pacific while its rival scatters assets throughout the seven seas. The competitor that can hurl its entire armed might against a fraction of its opponent’s commands a distinct advantage. Advantage: China.

So how does the balance work out in Asia? It’s tough to say. What’s not tough to say is this: blithely discounting a rising competitor’s skill, ingenuity, and élan represents a mistake of the first order—and a mistake to which established powers appear acutely prone. Americans should refuse to let triumphalism about submarine warfare—or any other combat domain—color their geopolitical judgments. China is a serious competitor boasting serious capability.

And it could get its way. Clausewitz lists three ways one antagonist can prevail over another in war. One combatant can defeat the other militarily and impose terms. That’s the obvious way: crush your enemy, see him driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women! The other two methods apply to peacetime strategic competition as well. They involve playing head games with opponents. Beijing excels at head games. If a combatant can dishearten its opponent—say, by mounting an impressive show of force at a well-chosen place and time—it can win by default. Or if it can ratchet up the price of victory higher than the opponent is willing to pay—by threatening to inflict heavy damage, or to string out the enterprise without end, or to otherwise sap his resources—cost/benefit logic should prompt that opponent to stand down.

The weak, then, can overcome the strong. They have done so many times in history. China doesn’t relish a test of arms. What sane government does? But it enjoys far more options and far greater prospects of success than Professor Ross allows. Let’s give China’s military and its political overseers their due.

"Shore based component of Chinese mil. power..."
This is the + factor that the PLAN have,something which one has been advocating for a long time,well over a decade+, for the IN too.
The Indian subcontinent is the "unsinkable carrrier" of the IN.The little island of Malta played its role in WW2 in the Meditt.,from where Allied aircraft sank German merchantmen supplying Rommel in N.Africa,which profoundly affected his campaign and prevented him from capturing the Suez Canal which would've cut off India from the British,severly affecting the course of the war.Remember that India supplied millions of troops in both WW1 and WW2,esp. with the 8th Army in N.Africa.In similar fashion,the huge land mass of the Indian sub-continent will play its part in any future conflict that straddles the IOR and Persian Gulf. part of the sub-continent is Sri Lanka,again another vital island which in WW2 was Lord Mountbatten's HQ.The control of SL is exceptionally vital to any conflict in which India is involved.It must be on India's side or neutralised.

Therefore,a string of coastal bases,naval air stations all round the Indian coastline,our island territories has to be accelerated and upgraded where existing.In the A&N islands,the Campbell Bay airstrip has to be lengthened for any aircraft type in IN/IAF service to operate from.In order to relieve the pressure on the IAF which is sorely underequipped and requires hundreds of aircraft replacements in the next few years,the IN could be tasked to take up the job of air defence of the island territories and maritime defence,which would also provide a seamless operational protocol,instead of inter-service cooperation which at times in the past has lagged behind in execution. The IN must be equipped with greater number of air assets,both MR fighters and LRMP/ASW aircraft.A naval version of the T-50/FGFA will be eventually built for the RuN.The IN should also plan to get iinvolved in the FGFA project which will increase numbers to be built and lower costs.In the interim,for a more capable land-based fighter,the Su-30MKI Super-Sukhoi or even the single-seat SU-35 could be looked at especially as the Flanker is now manufactured in india .
The plan to acquire /build Japanese amphoibs is laudable,but just building a dozen or two makes little economic sense.The country needs a variety of amphibs of different capabilities and sizes in the hundreds.The little Maldives have dozens of seaplane taxis ,soimething that we have yet to exploit for tourism alone!

[vijaykarthik]

Wonder if anybody knows why India is siding with China on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Reckon its getting unveiled today. and looks like India is planning to be a founding member. Any reason why when we are going to be part of the NDB too? Why this desperation about dev banks suddenly?

First project for AIIB looks like the silk road route. Hey, wait a minute. Didn't India want to go slow on the silk road route??? What the heck.

[sivab]

http://www.realcleardefense.com/article ... 07506.html

China's Aircraft Carrier Trouble: Spewing Steam and Losing Power
'Liaoning' shut down during recent sea trials

There’s no more of a conspicuous and potent symbol of China’s growing naval power than the aircraft carrier Liaoning.

But the 53,000-ton, 999-foot-long carrier could be dangerous to her crew and prone to engine failures. If so, that makes the vessel as much of a liability as an asset to Beijing.

The ex-Soviet carrier once went by the name Varyag until a cash-strapped Ukraine sold the ship to Beijing in 1998. The Chinese navy has since invested considerable resources into modernizing the warship and testing her at sea.

But on at least one occasion during recent sea trials, Liaoning appeared to suffer a steam explosion which temporarily knocked out the carrier’s electrical power system. The failure, reported by Chinese media site Sina.com, resulting from a leak in “the machine oven compartment to the water pipes.”

We’re only able to glimpse at the carrier’s engine problems, as we know very little about what’s inside the ship. This includes even what kind of engines Liaoning has.

The Chinese government also doesn’t like to admit to problems with its military hardware. When it does—and that’s never guaranteed—the admissions often come months or years after problems come up.

During the accident, hot water and steam began “spewing” out of the engine’s oven compartment, Sina.com reported. One cabin became “instantly submerged in water vapor,” the report added.

The crew immediately evacuated the cabin, with one officer apparently pulling a sailor out by his collar to save him from the extremely hot steam. The carrier then lost power, but the crew “eventually restored power to ensure the smooth operation of the ship.”

Fortunately, this doesn’t appear to have been a catastrophic boiler failure of the kind that would unleash almost instantaneously lethal, high-pressure steam. It’s possible Liaoning instead suffered a low-pressure steam release involving a faulty heat exchanger. Vessels commonly use heat exchangers to control water temperature necessary for regulating internal power and heating.

The Chinese navy began modernizing the ex-Varyag in 2005—essentially rebuilding the carrier from the inside. New electronics, self-defense anti-aircraft guns and new engines were just some of the upgrades. The warship in her unimproved condition was a “basket case,” an unnamed officer told the Website.

Engine failures are not an unknown phenomenon aboard ex-Soviet carriers. The 40,000-ton displacement Indian carrier Vikramaditya—first a Soviet Kiev-class carrier commissioned in 1987 and sold in 2004—temporarily shut down at sea after a boiler overheated two years ago.

The 50,000-ton Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov also goes nowhere without a tug escort in case her engines break down while underway.

The Chinese navy isn’t going to get rid of Liaoning any time soon. She’s Beijing’s first serviceable carrier and the ship is a valuable resource for naval flight operations. Even if China never sends her into battle, she’s useful for training and learning how carriers work.

But powerplant problems can also make it so China can do little else. Failures can add costly repairs, shorten the vessel’s lifespan and force her to crawl along the water at slow speeds. Beijing also lacks large overseas naval bases—a necessity if trouble arises while Liaoning sails far from China’s shores.

If she ever does. Liaoning is more alike to its ex-Soviet cousins than different—confined to home ports and restricted from challenging rivals like India.

“Since China began to send navy convoys on anti-piracy missions to the Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast in 2008,” military analyst Liu Zhongmin wrote in Global Times in 2010. “The lack of overseas bases has emerged as a major impediment to the Chinese navy’s cruising efficiency.”

Now add the possibility of engine problems.

[SSridhar]

Wonder if anybody knows why India is siding with China on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Reckon its getting unveiled today. and looks like India is planning to be a founding member. Any reason why when we are going to be part of the NDB too? Why this desperation about dev banks suddenly?

First project for AIIB looks like the silk road route. Hey, wait a minute. Didn't India want to go slow on the silk road route??? What the heck.

vijaykarthik, I don't know why but I can only guess the following. NDB, we have to be becausee it is BRICS bank. AIIB, we do not need to be but we were invited by China. Possibly, it was felt that it is better to be within that entity to understand what it was up to rather than staying outside by spurning the offer. We spurned the ASEAN and it then took us decades to enter that. We wouldn't lose by being part of AIIB. Geostrategically too, we need to play both sides to our advantage. We have been challenging the Bretton Woods institutions and demanding a restructuring of IMF/WB and the ADB. This helps to put pressure.

[vijaykarthik]

^^ the way I look at it, it looks like a disaster in the making. China footing more than 50% of the governorship and will make it look like a mockery... and with Japan actually looking like its bowing down, it will be a very advantageous move. Looks like the US is cluck-clucking too. Ouch, I hope the guys who are doing it are aware of what they are getting into.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Busi ... 917893.cms

Is there someone here who has done a nice analysis on the AIIB? Doesn't look like there is a lot of news on this.

this sentence is of interest:
"The details of the memorandum are not known. China may retain substantial voting rights while India too was expected to get a fair amount of voting rights commensurate with its size. "
Fair amount? Wonder what that means. About 10-12%?

More: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/thre ... 97289.html

[SSridhar]

Three major nations absent as China launches World Bank rival in Asia - Reuters, ToI

Australia, Indonesia and South Korea skipped the launch of a China-backed Asian infrastructure bank on Friday as the United States said it had concerns about the new rival to Western-dominated multilateral lenders.

China's $50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is seen as a challenge to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, both multilateral lenders that count Washington and its allies as their biggest financial backers.

China, which is keen to extend its influence in the region, has limited voting power over these existing banks despite being the world's second-largest economy.

The AIIB, launched in Beijing at a ceremony attended by Chinese finance minister Lou Jiwei and delegates from 21 countries including India, Thailand and Malaysia, aims to give project loans to developing nations. China is set to be its largest shareholder with a stake of up to 50 percent.

Indonesia was not present {That is surprising considering the fact that Jakarta was the alternate location for the HQ of AIIB. It was in the joint session of the Indonesian Parliament in October 2013 that Xi Jinping proposed formally the AIIB and invited Indonesia to join it.} and neither were South Korea and Australia, according to a pool report.

Japan, China's main rival in Asia and which dominates the $164 billion Asian Development Bank along with the United States, was also not present, but it was not expected to be.

Media reports said US secretary of state John Kerry put pressure on Australia to stay out of the AIIB.

However, state department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: "Secretary Kerry has made clear directly to the Chinese as well as to other partners that we ?welcome the idea of an infrastructure bank for Asia but we strongly urge that it meet international standards of governance and transparency.

"We have concerns about the ambiguous nature of the AIIB proposal as it currently stands, that we have also expressed publicly."

In a speech to delegates after the inauguration, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the new bank would use the best practices of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.{Very doubtful. The Chinese operate very casually and opaquely in matters of financial transactions. Besides, there is a motive for setting up the bank which is to undermine the hegemony of the US and its allies and to establish the pre-eminence of China in Asia to start with. One expects best practices to be thrown to winds. It is for other founding nations to constantly nudge AIIB and establish transparency and good accounting practices, irrespective of what 11 Jinping says about borroing best practices from WB & ADB }

"For the AIIB, its operation needs to follow multilateral rules and procedures," Xi said. "We have also to learn from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and other existing multilateral development institutions in their good practices and useful experiences."

PERSONAL LOBBYING

The Australian Financial Review said on Friday that Kerry had personally asked Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to keep Australia out of the AIIB.

"Australia has been under pressure from the US for some time to not become a founding member of the bank and it is understood Mr Kerry put the case directly to the prime minister when the pair met in Jakarta on Monday — following the inauguration of Indonesian President Joko Widodo," the paper said.

South Korea, one of Washington's strongest diplomatic allies in Asia, has yet to say it will formally participate in the bank. Its finance ministry said last week it has been speaking with China to request more consideration over details such as the AIIB's governance and operational principles.

"We have continued to demand rationality in areas such as governance and safeguard issues, and there's no reason (for Korea) not to join it," South Korean finance minister Choi Kyung-hwan said in Beijing on Thursday.

The Seoul-based JoongAng Daily quoted a South Korean diplomatic source as saying: "While Korea has been dropped from the list of founding members of the AIIB this time around, it is still in a deep dilemma on what sort of strategic choices it has to make as China challenges the US-led international order."

The AIIB is expected to begin operations in 2015 with senior Chinese banker Jin Liqun, ex-chairman of investment bank China International Capital Corp, expected to take a leading role.

Last month, China's finance ministry said Australia and South Korea had expressed interest in the AIIB.

On Thursday, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) chief said he did not welcome a China-backed rival bank that will have a virtually identical aim.

"I understand it, but I don't welcome it," said bank president Takehiko Nakao. "I'm not so concerned."

The ADB, created in 1966, offers grants and below-market interest rates on loans to lower to middle-income countries. At the end of 2013, its lending amounted to $21.02 billion.

China has a 6.5% stake in the ADB, while the United States and Japan have about 15.6 percent each.

[chaanakya]

x-posted
World
China launches first mission to moon and back

China launched its first space mission to the moon and back early on Friday, authorities said, the latest step forward for Beijing's ambitious programme to one day land a Chinese citizen on the Earth's only natural satellite.

The unnamed, unmanned probe will travel to the moon, fly around it and head back to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere and landing, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) said in a statement.

"The first stage of the first return journey test in China's moon probe programme has been successful," it said after the launch, from the Xichang space base in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

The module will be 413,000 kilometres from Earth at its furthest point on the eight-day mission, it added.

The official Xinhua news agency said it would re-enter the atmosphere at 11.2 kilometres per second (25,000 mph) before slowing down -- a process that generates extremely high temperatures -- and landing in northern China's Inner Mongolia region.

The mission is intended to test technology to be used in the Chang'e-5, China's fourth lunar probe, which aims to gather samples from the moon's surface and will be launched around 2017, SASTIND said previously.

Beijing sees its multi-billion-dollar space programme as a marker of its rising global stature and mounting technical expertise, as well as evidence of the ruling Communist Party's success in turning around the fortunes of the once poverty-stricken nation.

The military-run project has plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually to send a human to the moon.

China currently has a rover, the Jade Rabbit, on the surface of the moon.

The craft, launched as part of the Chang'e-3 lunar mission late last year, has been declared a success by Chinese authorities, although it has been beset by mechanical troubles.
- See more at: http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-new ... 9vYsq.dpuf

[vijaykarthik]

@SSridhar : Reason for surprise is this: Jakarta was UUI [Under US Influence!]

Aside: Jokowi, finally, recently became the head of the country after the earlier mil gnrl accepted Jokowi as the elected leader.

[vijaykarthik]

http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/under-us ... onal-bank/

Interesting. So, the govt formation fiasco has also been a plausible factor in Indonesia's current stoppage.

[SSridhar]

China has been striving to setup organizations and structures parallel to those which are dominated by western powers. Thus, it setup the AIIB to rival the WB, ADB and the JICA. The MSR is a counterbalance for the American-sponsored TPP. The SCO is to rival the ASEAN. China is planning to convert the Xiangshan Forum (XF), an informal gathering of defence scholars, into a regular high-end security and defence forum rivalling the Shangri-La forum, an annual conference of defence ministers of ASEAN and other countries held in Singapore annually.

[SSridhar]

China criticizes new U.S. missile defense radar in Kyoto - Japan Times

The United States is damaging stability in the Asia-Pacific region by positioning a missile defense radar in Japan, according to an official in Beijing.

“Neighboring countries pushing forward the deployment of anti-missile systems in the Asia-Pacific and seeking unilateral security is not beneficial to strategic stability and mutual trust in the region,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular briefing. {Only China can do these things. Only China can proliferate n-weapons, their designs and delivery systems to others. It is the new hegemon. China surrounding other countries, intruding into their land, claiming their land, causing impediments to freedom of navigation in high seas, defying international conventions and agreements after signing them are all acceptable behaviour simply because China does it}

“It is not beneficial to peace and stability in Northeast Asia,” she said.

Countries should not use “excuses to harm the security interests of other countries,” Hua added, describing the situation as “deeply concerning.”

The Defense Ministry has said an X-Band radar system was delivered on Tuesday to the U.S. military’s communication facility in Kyoto. It is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of the year.

North Korea has carried out a series of missile tests this year, including two medium-range missiles capable of hitting Japan. Pyongyang has also threatened another nuclear test.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has said two Navy destroyers equipped with missile defense systems would be deployed to Japan by 2017 in response to provocations from North Korea.

China has ratcheted up military spending in recent years, putting in place new submarines, surface ships and anti-ship ballistic missiles, which the U.S. sees as a counter to its military presence in the region.

U.S. has deployed P-8 maritime patrol aircraft since December 2013, in the first such stationing of the aircraft outside U.S. territory. The U.S. has also deployed the long-range Global Hawk drones since April 2014 for surveillance of the Senkaku islands. The proposed X-band radar at an Air Self-Defense Force base in Kyoto Prefecture would complement the one already in the north of the country. The two more Aegis-equipped destroyers are in addition to the five already deployed around Japan.

[vijaykarthik]

^^ Has anyone documented Chinese idiot-speak and widely made them viral. I remember George Orwell did it well for Soviets and made a mockery of their propaganda. Reckon we will need to do this purely for Chinese snake speech too.

What a bunch of vicious cartoon characters.

If China takes a rig upto Vietnam, its not harmful to regional security. If it rams a boat about a 100 times, its not harmful, its done out of pure love only. However, if Japan tries to do something defensively, its harmful and obnoxious. If India sets up a camera somewhere in a few regions where it can observe silently what the Chinese side is upto, its dangerous and disturbing the status quo. Whats more, if India attempts to lay roads in the mountain regions of NE and Arunachal, China hopes that India doesn't unilaterally try to alter status quo while the border issue isn't settled.

[SSridhar]

Kerry voices concern over Asian infra bank - Mahim Pratap Singh, The Hindu

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), launched on Friday by China, with an authorised capital of $100 billion, is expected to be formally established by the end of 2015.

While the launch ceremony was presided over by Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei, President Xi Jinping met the representatives of the 21 countries later in the morning, Chinese state media reported.

. . . . .

Not everyone was optimistic about India’s potential gains from the multilateral financial partnership.

“I don’t think India stands to gain much out of the AIIB… it is unclear how it will benefit us,” eminent economist and senior fellow at the Centre for Policy research Rajiv Kumar told The Hindu .

“If India is to be part of this Chinese initiative rivalling U.S.-backed multilateral lending organisations, it should at least get some tangible benefit out of it… it should leverage its participation for some clear diplomatic or strategic gain,” Mr. Kumar said.

[SSridhar]

India signs up for China’s Asian bank - Mahim Pratap Singh, The Hindu

China led 21 Asian nations, including India, in forming a multilateral financial front in the form of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), being seen as a challenger to the U.S.-backed Bretton Woods institutions.

India signed a memorandum of understanding, along with Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal and others, as the founding member of the AIIB on Friday.

Usha Titus, Joint Secretary, Economic Affairs division of the Finance Ministry, signed the MoU on India’s behalf.

$ 50 billion capital

With an initial subscribed capital of $50 billion, the setting up of the Beijing-headquartered AIIB has been welcomed by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

However, the U.S. has expressed concerns over the bank’s “ambiguous nature” and lack of “transparency.”

Reacting to the criticism, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on Friday said “during the whole process of the AIIB, China has maintained communication and coordination with Japan, the United States, Indonesia and other countries.”

The group

The 21-nation group comprises Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Welcomed

FICCI secretary-general A. Didar Singh called it a “very positive development in the sense that it opens up more borrowing opportunities.” The AIIB, with an authorized capital of $US 100 billion, is expected to be formally established by the end of 2015.

While the launch ceremony was presided over by Chinese finance Minister Lou Jiwei, President Xi Jinping met with the representatives of the 21 countries later in the morning, Chinese state media reported.

[SSridhar]

Do not use Xiaomi phones, IAF tells staff - The Hindu

IAF personnel and their families have been asked to desist from using Chinese ‘Xiaomi Redmi 1S’ phones as these are believed to be transferring data to their servers in China and could be a security risk.

“F-secure, a leading security solution company, recently carried out a test of Xiaomi Redmi 1S, the company’s budget smartphone, and found that the phone was forwarding carrier name, phone number, IMEI (the device identifier) plus numbers from address book and text messages back to Beijing,” says an advisory issued by the IAF.

The IAF note, issued some weeks ago, has been prepared by its intelligence unit. — PTI