Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On 2 November, on the sidelines of the G20 leaders meeting in Cannes, Zhang Tao, director general of the international department of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), averred that China’s foreign exchange management strategy was based on ‘the principle of safety, liquidity and adding value’.
Given the US$271 billion in reserve losses presumed to have accrued during the 2003-2010 period as a result of the US dollar’s depreciation, this notion of ‘safety’ appears to be a rather elastic one. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On 7 September 2011 in Dacca, the prime ministers of India and Bangladesh signed a landmark protocol to their 1974 Land Boundary Agreement, providing for final settlement of their long-pending boundary issues.
Given that instances of territorial dispute settlement in this sovereignty-conscious region have been few and far between, this exercise in statesmanship is both commendable and long overdue. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International, Washington
On 19 July, the United States and India held the second meeting of their annual Strategic Dialogue, one of only a half-dozen such dialogue mechanisms that Washington has with other countries.
The budding US-India strategic axis has undoubtedly been one of the significant global geo-political undertakings of the past decade, and much has been written — oftentimes effusively — about its boundless promise in times ahead. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On 21 June at the US–Japan Security Consultative Committee (2+2) meeting in Washington, the US and Japan issued their single most important alliance-related joint statement since the release of their ‘common strategic objectives’ six years earlier during the Bush–Koizumi heyday.
Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
In its catchy 2003 report which conjectured that the combined GDP of the BRIC economies would exceed that of the United States, Japan, Britain, France and Germany, collectively, by mid-century, Goldman Sachs projected the sizes of the Chinese, Indian, Russian and Brazilian economies to be US$ trillion 4.8, 1.4, 1.2 and 0.9 respectively, in 2015.
In fact, each of the BRICs surpassed its projection in 2010. Clearly, the future is arriving sooner than was thought! Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
United States Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk’s open admission recently that a Doha Round deal is unlikely to be reached this year, coming as it does on the heels of reports that the United States attempted to organize agreement in Geneva to suspend the Round, bodes poorly for the future health of the multilateral trade negotiation system.
Yet in good measure, the United States has been the villain of the piece here, its penchant to indulgently re-frame, mid-stream, the terms of Doha’s already-unwieldy core bargain to suit domestic constituencies going to the heart of the problem. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Civilizational, cultural, and geographic neighbours, India and Indonesia share striking commonalities in their modern historical trajectories.
In both societies, European powers, the Dutch and the British, benefiting from the decline of tired Islamic land empires, had grafted colonial modes of exploitation that progressed fitfully from coast to hinterland to interior. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International Associates
Embarking on his 2005 visit to New Delhi, Premier Wen Jiabao had noted that the India trip was the most important item on his international calendar that year.
In New Delhi, Wen and Prime Minister Singh proceeded to append their signatures to a groundbreaking set of political parameters aimed at solving their longstanding boundary question. For India, the parameters constituted a belated formal acceptance of the significant elements of the principles-based offer to boundary dispute resolution that had first been tabled by Zhou Enlai in New Delhi almost 45 years to the day of the 2005 meeting. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On September 7th, in the ‘territorial seas’ of the Senkaku/Daioyu islands, a Chinese fishing trawler rammed two Japanese coast guard vessels with deliberate intent. While the trawler’s detained crew of 14 was released on September 13th after being questioned on a voluntary basis, the skipper was arrested on September 10th and placed under a court-authorised 10-day detention period while prosecutors deliberated whether to indict him or not. Following extension of the detention for a further 10-day period on September 20th, and with Beijing blowing a fit – and ties deteriorating, Tokyo made a political decision on September 24th to release the offending fisherman, though it was officially framed as an independent decision of the Naha District Public Prosecutors Office.
Basic Sovereignty-related Aspects of the Senkakus/Daioyus
Though under Japan’s effective control and administration, sovereignty over the islands is contested by both China and Taiwan. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On November 5, President Barack Obama became the first US president in more than three decades to pay a state visit to India during his first term in office. The visit, though modest in content, followed in his predecessor George W. Bush’s vein of extricating India from the ‘technology denial regime’ that Washington itself had instituted in bits and pieces following New Delhi’s nuclear test of 1974. Further, in a gesture that thrilled his hosts, President Obama endorsed India’s candidature to a permanent seat in a future expanded Security Council, during an address to the Indian Parliament. The American side, curiously though, provided no such direct assurance in the Joint Statement. Rather, the Indian side borrows the president’s phraseology to Parliament – look forward to a reformed UN Security Council that includes India as a permanent member – and thereafter proceeds to express gratitude for it as affirmation of India’s candidature!
Insofar as the East Asian region is concerned, both countries expressed their commitment to an ‘open, balanced and inclusive’ order, and to the stability of, and access to, vital public commons therein – air, sea, space, and cyberspace. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On October 25, in Tokyo, at their annual yearly summit meeting, Prime Ministers Kan and Singh announced the successful conclusion of negotiations towards their Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA). Almost four years in the making, the most drawn-out EPA negotiation among the twelve such conducted by METI, the agreement is not expected to be precedential. Indian ‘civil society’ fears of TRIPS-plus intellectual property protections – especially for plant varieties – accorded to Japanese firms have not been borne out. Indian generic drug exports are to benefit from approval processes on par with domestic firms. The investment chapter does not grant pre-establishment rights of entry to Japanese investors nor adopts ambitious approaches to eliminating Indian performance requirements and capital control restraints, even as it affords enhanced protections to Japanese investors.
For Tokyo too, sensitive items such as rice, beef, pork and poultry are exempted, while tariffs on auto-parts, home appliances and iron and steel products – key sectors of advantage hitherto accruing to rival Korean exporters vide the Korea-India CEPA, are to be liberalised or eliminated. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
In the inflamed commentary that has followed the Chinese skipper’s collision with Japanese coast guard vessels in the East China Sea, there has perhaps been no more flawed a characterisation than portrayal of the incident exclusively through the lens of territoriality. In fact, considering the location of the clash — in coastal waters abutting the disputed Senkaku Islands — and the prior existence of mutually agreed disciplines (Sino-Japanese Fisheries Agreement of 1997) that seek to functionally quarantine Senkaku-related bilateral fisheries disputes from the charged accompanying issue of territorial title, portrayals of the incident have ranged from the naïve to the disingenuous.
This failure of analysis has not been limited exclusively to Western observers. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Ichiro Ozawa has been subject to a good deal of criticism over the past few days and for reasons not limited to his penchant for Kakuei Tanaka-style, traditionalist pork barrel politics. What Ozawa’s critics fail to understand though is that Japanese politics does not yet have a modernising centre that can hold.
Certainly, there are modernising reformers strewn across the political aisle. Yet neither party’s modernisers have the votes within their own party to guide reform policy through the Diet, and cross-aisle cooperation among modernisers is an idea whose time has not yet arrived. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
During the last week of May, in the Chinese city of Luoyang, one of the four great ancient capital cities on the central plain, Indian President Pratibha Patil dedicated an Indian-style Buddhist temple to the people of China. The first such Indian-style temple to be built in China in many centuries – and one housed, fittingly, within the precinct of the first such temple ever constructed on Chinese soil almost two millennia ago (the White Horse Monastery), the shrine constitutes a powerful symbol of independent India’s determination to revert to the syncretic world whose ideas it once shaped and within which it once participated wholly.
Regardless of whether the Buddhist scriptures arrived in Luoyang via Central Asia on the back of a white horse, as legend has it, or were in fact carried by itinerant preachers (early missionaries being associated with horses in the Chinese Buddhist tradition), the land bridge that such spiritual contact erected ushered in a brilliant early age of Asian cosmopolitanism. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Seeking to solidify their Global and Strategic Partnership, Prime Ministers Aso and Singh had issued a Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation in October 2008. The landmark document was only the second instance of such bilateral cooperation entered into by Tokyo, aside from its security arrangement with the US. In keeping with the upgraded schedule of ministerial-level consultations envisaged in the Joint Declaration (and its accompanying Action Plan), over the Golden Week holiday period Defence Minister Kitazawa paid a visit to his counterpart in New Delhi.
Topics of discussion included safety of sea lines of communication, anti-piracy cooperation as well as drawing up a timeline of joint exercises to be conducted by the two countries’ navies. Read more…
