SMART POLICY BY PM MODI WILL FRUSTRATE PLA DESIGNS ON BORDER

The PRC needs a neutral India and this it hopes to achieve by showcasing that the costs of abandoning neutrality, which by definition includes continued reliance on Russia for defence needs, would be severe.

Neither the top tier of the Chinese Communist Party (which elevated him in 2012 to the post of CCP General Secretary over the claims of Li Keqiang), nor the international community correctly understood the difference between Xi Jinping and his party peers. Before taking over the top job in China, Xi had been content to walk in the shadow of his elders. The anti-corruption campaigns that he launched prior to his appointment in 2012 had netted only small fish, or those few in the middle echelons who had fallen out of favour with higher echelons in the CCP. There were few hints of the thorough-going changes that Xi would make to both the CCP as well as to domestic and foreign policy soon after his takeover, or of his emergence not just as first among equals but as the second CCP supremo after Mao.

What the elders who chose Xi over Li in 2012 failed to factor in was the fact that in common with Mao Zedong, Xi has a ruthless drive to promote the Han nationalist concept of where the PRC should be, and what needs to be done to get it there. In Mao’s case, the effort was mostly internal. In Xi’s case, the drive for primacy is global. The tactics and policies of Mao and Xi are in many respects different, yet the underlying objective remained the same, which was to position Beijing as the fulcrum of the global order, in much the same way as Washington emerged in 1945 after the war between the Axis and the Allies. Mao took care to camouflage this intention behind a smokescreen expertly crafted by Prime

Students wearing protective face masks take the Gujarat Common Entrance Test while maintaining social distancing amidst the outbreak of Covid-19, inside a classroom in Ahmedabad, on Monday.

Minister Zhou Enlai, going on verbal offensives against the “hegemony of the United States” to show the PRC’S commitment to an equalitarian world order. During the period in power of Deng Xiaoping, “biding time and concealing strength” became the rule, with China moving away from overt reliance on the military after the 1979 attack on Vietnam. The Paramount Leader instead turned to the use of diplomacy and commerce to create the conditions needed for the rise of China within the post-1945 international order. Mao was clear that this order needed to change, but concentrated on internal changes in preparation for the shift. Interestingly,

Mao’s expansion of the PRC and Deng’s expansion of the economy created the conditions that Xi believed he needed to effect changes globally and in the open. Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao expended vast sums of money in developing a network of friendly contacts across the world, paying