This article examines U.S.-China military-to-military relations and outlines a strategy for improving ties by expanding contacts across a range of functional areas.
In recent years, the governments of China and India have initiated a strategic partnership. Talks of creating an integrated "Chindia" economic hub have been commonplace. Many studies have been ...undertaken from conflicting perspectives on bilateral relations at the high level, but how ordinary Chinese people view their contemporary Indian counterparts and how this provides a civic dimension to the partnership remains underexplored. In an authoritarian nation where exhibiting sentiments contrary to the party-state's policy is not encouraged and remains uncommon, the Chinese have increasingly relied upon the internet to express their views on various aspects of policy, including that towards India. Using systematic, qualitative research on the online community, this article categorizes the various opinions expressed by Chinese internet users about India, the Indians and Beijing's Indian policy; analyses the apparent huge gap between these perceptions and the official rhetoric of Beijing; and forecasts how such perceptions might influence future Sino-Indian relations.
600 years ago China was the greatest maritime nation in the world, but after the voyages of Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty withdrew from the sea, and China reverted to its traditional focus on ..."continental" interests. Today China is going back to sea. China's "Great Leap Outward" onto the world's oceans is visible in its growing merchant marine; rise in the global shipbuilding market; and efforts to develop a "blue water" navy. This paper will examine how, starting with Deng Xiaoping's reforms in 1978, China has developed a comprehensive strategy for maritime growth. China's return to the sea will be analyzed under these headings: 1) China has created "treasure fleets" of Chinese built and operated ships to carry China's trade, projected at $1 trillion by 2020. Chinese companies are building ports and providing management services as far afield as Greece and Panama. 2) Shipbuilding has been so successful that China's goal is to become the world's merchant shipbuilding leader by 2015. 3) China has created Asia's largest navy, building a "blue-water" navy to operate on the open ocean. 4) A "navalist" party has emerged, with the theories of Mahan added to the curriculum for military education of Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) officers. 5) When China has the ships, men, and money too, what will it do with its new maritime and naval capabilities? Do China's history, and world history, offer clues and parallels for what it may do once it becomes both a major shipping and naval power? The topic "The Great Leap Outward" fits the theme of China in World History. It will analyze China's maritime renaissance both 1) in the context of China's history and 2) in comparison to other states in the modern era that rose to become powers at sea. China, in fact, has a historical maritime heritage that long predates the modern period e.g., Chinese ships first entered the Indian Ocean when sailors of the Wu kingdom found a sea route to India via Southeast Asia. China's maritime spirit especially thrived under the southern Song, but there has always been a strong "continentalist" pull, and the debate over land/sea orientation continues today in the Peoples Republic. Second: comparisons will be made with states in the modern era that developed seapower as they rose to become great powers e.g., Germany and Japan. Is China following their footsteps, or is China unique in that it has developed a large merchant marine first, and only later is creating a navy to protect it, rather than building both simultaneously?
Satia examines the British Indian development of Iraq and argues that the modern notion of colonial development was a highly contingent product of the expansion of the British empire into the Middle ...East via India--during the First World War, before it became what historians have generally described it as: a response, played out largely in sub-Saharan Africa, to the crisis of empire in the Second World War. She first examines the representations of the Mesopotamia campaign in the official and private accounts of those who served there in order to illuminate the sources of their optimism about technology and, as a result, empire, as progressive forces in that country. In the next section, she outlines Indian efforts to provision the force, which many Britons saw as proof that empire was fundamentally a means of technological development, and the consequences of those efforts for India's position within the empire.
