Rush Doshi on what China wants, Amitav Ghosh’s cautionary tale on climate change and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. 

Welcome to this edition of  The Hindu on Books Newsletter. 

 “What does China want?” That’s the question Rush Doshi tries to explain in his new book  The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (OUP). To overturn the U.S.-led international order, China, argues Doshi, is pursuing a clear grand strategy, which has been in the works for decades.  China’s ambition and agenda is based on the understanding that the “world order is at stake because of unprecedented geopolitical and technological shifts, and that this requires strategic adjustments.” In their book,  The Comrades and the Mullahs (HarperCollins), Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny contend that China has shown a “willingness to insert itself as a power player and act more forcefully to secure its economic and security interests in the neighbourhood” as well. For instance, Beijing has come to conclude that the “best way to manage risks in Afghanistan…would be by betting on the Taliban.” There have been several books on India-China relations in the past few years which touch on all aspects of bilateral ties from the border dispute, Tibet, future strategies and so forth. Nirupama Rao’s  The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China 1949-1962 (Penguin) highlights the flawed history of the initial years of the political relationship between India and China leading up to the 1962 war; A.S. Bhasin’s  Nehru, Tibet and China (Penguin) points out that by not raising the border issue with China while discussing Tibet, India squandered an opportunity; In  India and Asian Geopolitics: Past, Present (Penguin), Shivshankar Menon argues that China taking Tibet in 1950 is a pivotal moment in India-China relations. In his book,  How India Sees the World (Juggernaut), among other foreign policy issues, Shyam Saran focuses on China, a country he has studied for decades. His new book,  How China Sees India and the World (Juggernaut) is out end of the month, and analyses contemporary India-China ties, based on close readings of Chinese Communist Party leaders’ speeches and writings and his own experiences as diplomat and foreign secretary.

In reviews, we read about China in the world order, a journey with COVID-19 victims, a parable on our relationship with nature, stories of Indian migrants in the Gulf and more.

In his book,  The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Rush Doshi places China in the midst of a continuing historical and cultural process. Xi Jinping’s aggressive foreign policy is not fundamentally different from Deng Xiaoping’s opening up or engagement. Rather, it’s part of a long game which China has been playing with a clear grand strategy. For a country that suffered ‘a century of humiliation’ at the hands of invading forces and a poor, backward looking agrarian society at the time of the communist revolution, China has come a long way. It is now the world’s second largest economy, a manufacturing and technological powerhouse and has the world’s largest navy.  What does it want next? Will China be ready to play second fiddle to the United States in an American-controlled global order or will it try to displace the U.S. as the world’s leader and build a new China-centric order? Doshi emphatically argues that the contest between the U.S. and China is about who should lead the global order, says Stanly Johny in his review. “Doshi makes a forthright assessment of America’s decline, which he argues started in 2008. But his key argument is that there’s nothing fatalistic about the decline of American power. The U.S. has seen several ‘waves of declinism’ in the last century and has bounced back. America, he contends, should subvert the order China is trying to build employing asymmetric strategies and rebuild the American order with liberal values to ensure that it stays the global leader. The question that’s not answered is whether the U.S. has the economic and institutional capacity to play a long game against China like China has been doing for decades.” 

The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order review: A contest for global leadership

The Living Mountain (Fourth Estate) by Amitav Ghosh is a no-nonsense tale, says the reviewer Neha Sinha. The slim book is a parable, ‘a fable of our times’, which suggests that “while there may not be one way of looking at Nature, there indeed is a way we should  not look at Nature. We shouldn’t expect it to be a domestic familiar, destined to lie in chains of mining and megalomania.” Ghosh spins the story around Living Mountain, a mountain that feeds a tree which produces valuable honey, flowers – and fragrant nuts. This forms the bedrock of an indigenous economy. This way of life is interrupted with the coming of the Anthropoi – militarised men of machines with no time for oral traditions. “The  Living Mountain should not be dismissed as pandemic fiction… Instead, it should be seen as the beginning of the real, normative question – what do we do, now that we know that the Anthropocene is here, espoused and glibly defended by us?” 

Once upon a mahaparbat: Neha Sinha reviews Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Living Mountain’