Interview on Africa’s political economy, climate changes and revolutionary politics with Dr Leo Zeilig,
Editor of the Review of African Political Economy, and editor of roape.net.
Aneetta: How can Africa’s political economy revamp its socio-economic policies in the light of the increasing threat from climate change?
Dr Zeilig: Africa is severely impacted by climate change, perhaps more than any other continent. Let’s take 2019 and 2020, for example, apart from the devastation of the Pandemic (itself a result of capitalist intrusion into the natural world) was a period that saw climate extremes. Wildfires in Brazil, Bolivia, Australia, and the United States of America. While in Africa climate crisis has thrust more than 30 million Africans from Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Sudan, to Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya into direct food crises. These changes always impact and interact with ‘human forces’, so there has been an increase also in violent conflicts and poverty as a result. The entire terrain is being shaped by the environmental emergency – if you take an area particularly under threat, the Sahel, an arid semi-desert region that runs across the top of the north of West Africa, you see ‘complex emergencies’, deforestation, religious insurgencies, emerging, in part, out of decades-long environmental degradation and collapse.
Then there is the whole of southern Africa which has heated up at more than twice the global rate. 2019 saw two cyclones hit the region in one season, this was unprecedent. Many researchers see these cyclones as a result of warming in the Indian Ocean.
For a number of reasons, the continent has been especially impacted by climate change, many of these are to do with the devastating – and continuing – legacy of European occupation and colonialisation. The continent won formal independence in the 1960s and 1970s, but fundamental change to its political economy, revamping as you say, has alluded Africa. Almost without exception the continent is still buffeted by political and economic forces outside its control.
Seizing on the challenges which grip the planet in the climate emergency, is especially difficult in these circumstances yet essential. This will take coordinated action, internationally, but with political control in the hands of what the brilliant African revolutionary, Frantz Fanon in 1961 described as ‘a caste of profiteers’, there is little chance of this decision making coming from states and politicians.
Like elsewhere in the world, the most effective change always comes from outside established political structures, namely from below. There is no more powerful case then the flowering of militant environmental movements, who are increasingly fixing their energy on a revolutionary reordering of global political economy and capitalism. I am thinking about groups like Extinction Rebellion, active in the UK, but also the brilliant Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), based in Nigeria and led by Nnimmo Bassey.
In these cases, environmental politics has become the new and necessary anti-capitalist communism of 21st century. No solution to the emergency can be solved nationally, and no reformist compromise will save the planet, its human and animal inhabitants, which is structurally fixated on the maximisation of profit (the control, commodification and marketisation of land, labour and resources).
Aneetta: Can one foresee an Afro-Asian century of growth in the coming decades of the 21st century? If that is the case, can you enunciate certain examples in this regard?
Dr Zeilig: I see this ‘Afro-Asian century of growth’ a little more negatively than the question implies. We must view the development of Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world in terms of imperialism.
So there have been some important economic shifts. According to data, Africa’s portion of global Foreign Direct Investment increased to 11.4% by about 2015, and capital investment by 32%. Much of this growth was used as spurious evidence in the bourgeois media as ‘Africa rising’ – yet the crash in the prices of commodities (the ‘rising’ was largely a commodities boom) saw a collapse and crisis, now deepened by the impact of the Pandemic. Even during the height of this boom period, ordinary people on the continent continued to suffer.
I do not see China’s involvement in the continent, changing the general picture dramatically, or in the interests of the poor. During the period of Africa’s so-called boom FDI in Africa from the EU, China, Japan and the US grew more than five times in the decade after 2001. However, it was FDI from China which dwarfed the US, rising to 53 percent compared to 14 percent. The country’s extraordinary wealth has fast-tracked demand for raw materials to feed its rapid industrialization, but it has failed to see the continent beyond a source of raw commodities (though there have been some important infrastructure projects funded with Chinese monies, in fact they have funded a full two-thirds of such projects in the last decade). China is dependent on African exports.
The excellent radical writer on African politics, Lee Wengraf, outlines some of the imperial consequences of this rise in Chinese investment, loans and influence: ‘The rise of China in Africa has heightened militarization by the US, with major increases by the Obama administration for arms sales and military training in African countries. Meanwhile, when commodity prices crashed worldwide in early 2016, China announced that imports from Africa had fallen by a full 40 percent and currencies in the two largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, plummeted to their lowest levels ever. ‘
This ‘fall’ Wengraf indicates has been further exacerbated in the last year. The most pressing conclusion, is how do the peoples of Africa, wrestle back control from the ‘caste of profiteers’ and the global elite?
Aneetta: How adaptive has Africa been to the principles of democracy? Can one foresee a rise in political regimes that are based on democracy and rule of law?
Dr Zeilig: The continent is awash with democratic government – like the rest of the world. I would be careful about assuming that Africa is a special case globally in terms of what used to be called ‘bourgeoise democracy’. There are plenty of cases, of course, of bastardised elections, stolen votes, media tampering and corruption, but only as there is elsewhere … in Indian and the UK.
What is remarkable is the extent of popular mobilisation on the continent in support of real democratic politics. Uprisings and protests in the Maghreb, in Sudan, Algeria in 2018-9, in Burkina Faso and the Congo. These facts, so often missed, are vital to any real democracy … it is not enough to vote for compromised political parties, who promise much and deliver nothing, but to actively engage in political action.
There is a term which is used to describe the situation on the continent, but it could apply to many other parts of the world – ‘choiceless democracies.’ These are hollowed out democratic processes, where no real alternatives – how people live, their livelihoods, standard of living, and control over their lives – are offered. The confrontation with our empty politics – the lack of ideology – is a challenge that confront us all.
One of the greatest democratic moments was the wave of popular protests and movements, what I would describe as revolutions, in the 1980s and 1990s. There were a series of revolutions following the earlier ones that accompanied decolonization. An extraordinary array of uprisings and rebellions. Many of these revolutions were, in large part, a consequence of the quickening pace of structural reforms to African economies against IMF and World Bank imposed reforms. The revolutions in question were organized around a set of democratic demands, sparking the pro-democracy transitions that spread across Africa from 1990 onward. The extent of these uprisings, triggering major transitions in political power, is under-researched and extraordinary.
Africa exploded in a convulsion of pro-democracy revolutions that saw eighty-six major protests movements across thirty countries in 1991 alone. However, as with nationalist movements before them, the unity displayed by these “pro-democracy” revolutions in ousting dictatorial regimes commonly masked profound divisions regarding the outcomes they wished to see from this process of political and economic transformation. Coinciding as it did with the collapse of Soviet Communism and the emergence of a unipolar, US-dominated world, political liberalization, the immediate legacy of these revolutions, coincided with the dominance of market-based economic liberalization as the singular solution to the economic problems of the world in general, and of Africa in particular.
In telling the story of African democracy, these immense popular battles must also be told. Democracy – such as it is – is the result of great and energetic upheavals … there was no place on earth where the working poor did more to fight for change and democracy in this period than the African continent.
Aneetta: As Covid-19 pushes the world towards regionalism from globalization, will the African nation-states be ready to liberate themselves from their colonial dependencies especially in the sectors of trade and commerce? Please enunciate the role of Non-state actors in this regard.
Dr Zeilig: As you would expect from my answers above, I would see the colonial legacy as a massive and enduring factor in shaping African politics and economics, and efforts to subvert it, and shift power towards to the working (and non-formally employed) poor, is the action of these groups themselves. These may seem like abstract talking points, but they are not.
Take Covid-19, the continent was thrown into the pandemic already pulverised and bloodied by structural adjustment, and austerity which has lasted many, many lifetimes. Some countries used the opportunity to further bludgeon the poor – take Kenya, which is well practiced at state killings and police brutality, in the first weeks of the lockdown poor traders and informal workers, where beaten, arrested, and herded indoors. In Nigeria, there was a popular cartoon circulating, with a couple and child pictured suffering from hunger because they were forced to remain at home, while facing the threat of the virus if they left. The virus for many was exactly this choice, hunger and starvation, or risk of contamination and possible death but with a chance to maintain some sort of livelihood and to eat.
Like elsewhere on the continent, it was grassroots initiative in South Africa that provided for the poor – and was organised by the poor themselves. The C-19 People’s Coalition (C19PC) developed in the country in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Activist and socialists mobilised in the most difficult of circumstances on the issue of hunger seeing this correctly as the government’s chief failing and as a spur for organising this new, popular social movement.
We should recall that after more than twenty-five years of post-apartheid governments, nearly 40% of the labour-force was unemployed even before the pandemic. South Africa remains the most unequal society on earth. For a country led by a liberation movement that promised to reverse these inequalities, and who witnessed the failures of independence on the continent decades before the end of apartheid, these facts remain outrageous – criminal.
To answer your question directly, it is to the continent’s rich traditions and movements, its revolutionary politics, that we must turn. The poor must liberate themselves from colonial dependencies, from their own ruling class, and refigure the continent’s political economy to create a new world that works for people’s needs not the profits of the one percent.
Aneetta Thomas is a final year MA student in the Department of International Studies, Political Science and History.
Dr Zeilig: Africa is severely impacted by climate change, perhaps more than any other continent. Let’s take 2019 and 2020, for example, apart from the devastation of the Pandemic (itself a result of capitalist intrusion into the natural world) was a period that saw climate extremes. Wildfires in Brazil, Bolivia, Australia, and the United States of America. While in Africa climate crisis has thrust more than 30 million Africans from Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Sudan, to Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya into direct food crises. These changes always impact and interact with ‘human forces’, so there has been an increase also in violent conflicts and poverty as a result. The entire terrain is being shaped by the environmental emergency – if you take an area particularly under threat, the Sahel, an arid semi-desert region that runs across the top of the north of West Africa, you see ‘complex emergencies’, deforestation, religious insurgencies, emerging, in part, out of decades-long environmental degradation and collapse.
Then there is the whole of southern Africa which has heated up at more than twice the global rate. 2019 saw two cyclones hit the region in one season, this was unprecedent. Many researchers see these cyclones as a result of warming in the Indian Ocean.
For a number of reasons, the continent has been especially impacted by climate change, many of these are to do with the devastating – and continuing – legacy of European occupation and colonialisation. The continent won formal independence in the 1960s and 1970s, but fundamental change to its political economy, revamping as you say, has alluded Africa. Almost without exception the continent is still buffeted by political and economic forces outside its control.
Seizing on the challenges which grip the planet in the climate emergency, is especially difficult in these circumstances yet essential. This will take coordinated action, internationally, but with political control in the hands of what the brilliant African revolutionary, Frantz Fanon in 1961 described as ‘a caste of profiteers’, there is little chance of this decision making coming from states and politicians.
Like elsewhere in the world, the most effective change always comes from outside established political structures, namely from below. There is no more powerful case then the flowering of militant environmental movements, who are increasingly fixing their energy on a revolutionary reordering of global political economy and capitalism. I am thinking about groups like Extinction Rebellion, active in the UK, but also the brilliant Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), based in Nigeria and led by Nnimmo Bassey.
In these cases, environmental politics has become the new and necessary anti-capitalist communism of 21st century. No solution to the emergency can be solved nationally, and no reformist compromise will save the planet, its human and animal inhabitants, which is structurally fixated on the maximisation of profit (the control, commodification and marketisation of land, labour and resources).
Aneetta: Can one foresee an Afro-Asian century of growth in the coming decades of the 21st century? If that is the case, can you enunciate certain examples in this regard?
Dr Zeilig: I see this ‘Afro-Asian century of growth’ a little more negatively than the question implies. We must view the development of Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world in terms of imperialism.
So there have been some important economic shifts. According to data, Africa’s portion of global Foreign Direct Investment increased to 11.4% by about 2015, and capital investment by 32%. Much of this growth was used as spurious evidence in the bourgeois media as ‘Africa rising’ – yet the crash in the prices of commodities (the ‘rising’ was largely a commodities boom) saw a collapse and crisis, now deepened by the impact of the Pandemic. Even during the height of this boom period, ordinary people on the continent continued to suffer.
I do not see China’s involvement in the continent, changing the general picture dramatically, or in the interests of the poor. During the period of Africa’s so-called boom FDI in Africa from the EU, China, Japan and the US grew more than five times in the decade after 2001. However, it was FDI from China which dwarfed the US, rising to 53 percent compared to 14 percent. The country’s extraordinary wealth has fast-tracked demand for raw materials to feed its rapid industrialization, but it has failed to see the continent beyond a source of raw commodities (though there have been some important infrastructure projects funded with Chinese monies, in fact they have funded a full two-thirds of such projects in the last decade). China is dependent on African exports.
The excellent radical writer on African politics, Lee Wengraf, outlines some of the imperial consequences of this rise in Chinese investment, loans and influence: ‘The rise of China in Africa has heightened militarization by the US, with major increases by the Obama administration for arms sales and military training in African countries. Meanwhile, when commodity prices crashed worldwide in early 2016, China announced that imports from Africa had fallen by a full 40 percent and currencies in the two largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, plummeted to their lowest levels ever. ‘
This ‘fall’ Wengraf indicates has been further exacerbated in the last year. The most pressing conclusion, is how do the peoples of Africa, wrestle back control from the ‘caste of profiteers’ and the global elite?
Aneetta: How adaptive has Africa been to the principles of democracy? Can one foresee a rise in political regimes that are based on democracy and rule of law?
Dr Zeilig: The continent is awash with democratic government – like the rest of the world. I would be careful about assuming that Africa is a special case globally in terms of what used to be called ‘bourgeoise democracy’. There are plenty of cases, of course, of bastardised elections, stolen votes, media tampering and corruption, but only as there is elsewhere … in Indian and the UK.
What is remarkable is the extent of popular mobilisation on the continent in support of real democratic politics. Uprisings and protests in the Maghreb, in Sudan, Algeria in 2018-9, in Burkina Faso and the Congo. These facts, so often missed, are vital to any real democracy … it is not enough to vote for compromised political parties, who promise much and deliver nothing, but to actively engage in political action.
There is a term which is used to describe the situation on the continent, but it could apply to many other parts of the world – ‘choiceless democracies.’ These are hollowed out democratic processes, where no real alternatives – how people live, their livelihoods, standard of living, and control over their lives – are offered. The confrontation with our empty politics – the lack of ideology – is a challenge that confront us all.
One of the greatest democratic moments was the wave of popular protests and movements, what I would describe as revolutions, in the 1980s and 1990s. There were a series of revolutions following the earlier ones that accompanied decolonization. An extraordinary array of uprisings and rebellions. Many of these revolutions were, in large part, a consequence of the quickening pace of structural reforms to African economies against IMF and World Bank imposed reforms. The revolutions in question were organized around a set of democratic demands, sparking the pro-democracy transitions that spread across Africa from 1990 onward. The extent of these uprisings, triggering major transitions in political power, is under-researched and extraordinary.
Africa exploded in a convulsion of pro-democracy revolutions that saw eighty-six major protests movements across thirty countries in 1991 alone. However, as with nationalist movements before them, the unity displayed by these “pro-democracy” revolutions in ousting dictatorial regimes commonly masked profound divisions regarding the outcomes they wished to see from this process of political and economic transformation. Coinciding as it did with the collapse of Soviet Communism and the emergence of a unipolar, US-dominated world, political liberalization, the immediate legacy of these revolutions, coincided with the dominance of market-based economic liberalization as the singular solution to the economic problems of the world in general, and of Africa in particular.
In telling the story of African democracy, these immense popular battles must also be told. Democracy – such as it is – is the result of great and energetic upheavals … there was no place on earth where the working poor did more to fight for change and democracy in this period than the African continent.
Aneetta: As Covid-19 pushes the world towards regionalism from globalization, will the African nation-states be ready to liberate themselves from their colonial dependencies especially in the sectors of trade and commerce? Please enunciate the role of Non-state actors in this regard.
Dr Zeilig: As you would expect from my answers above, I would see the colonial legacy as a massive and enduring factor in shaping African politics and economics, and efforts to subvert it, and shift power towards to the working (and non-formally employed) poor, is the action of these groups themselves. These may seem like abstract talking points, but they are not.
Take Covid-19, the continent was thrown into the pandemic already pulverised and bloodied by structural adjustment, and austerity which has lasted many, many lifetimes. Some countries used the opportunity to further bludgeon the poor – take Kenya, which is well practiced at state killings and police brutality, in the first weeks of the lockdown poor traders and informal workers, where beaten, arrested, and herded indoors. In Nigeria, there was a popular cartoon circulating, with a couple and child pictured suffering from hunger because they were forced to remain at home, while facing the threat of the virus if they left. The virus for many was exactly this choice, hunger and starvation, or risk of contamination and possible death but with a chance to maintain some sort of livelihood and to eat.
Like elsewhere on the continent, it was grassroots initiative in South Africa that provided for the poor – and was organised by the poor themselves. The C-19 People’s Coalition (C19PC) developed in the country in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Activist and socialists mobilised in the most difficult of circumstances on the issue of hunger seeing this correctly as the government’s chief failing and as a spur for organising this new, popular social movement.
We should recall that after more than twenty-five years of post-apartheid governments, nearly 40% of the labour-force was unemployed even before the pandemic. South Africa remains the most unequal society on earth. For a country led by a liberation movement that promised to reverse these inequalities, and who witnessed the failures of independence on the continent decades before the end of apartheid, these facts remain outrageous – criminal.
To answer your question directly, it is to the continent’s rich traditions and movements, its revolutionary politics, that we must turn. The poor must liberate themselves from colonial dependencies, from their own ruling class, and refigure the continent’s political economy to create a new world that works for people’s needs not the profits of the one percent.
Aneetta Thomas is a final year MA student in the Department of International Studies, Political Science and History.
Understanding China from the Lenses of History
A Talk with Dr. Arunabh Ghosh,
Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History,
Harvard University-PART 1
Vishal: What do you think is the reason behind the lack of scientific interaction between scientists from India and China?
Dr. Ghosh: Today I don’t know what’s the exact situation is, but there is a fair amount of contact. There are lot of Indian Scientists who travel to China, participate in all kinds of workshops, all kinds of collaborative activities and vice versa. Chinese people are coming to India also. It’s actually picked up a lot since the 80s and the episodes I am looking at are typically earlier in the 20th century. I don’t know how meaningful they have been, to be honest I just haven’t looked at it closely enough to know, but of course the other thing to remember is that they are not just meeting in each other’s country, they are often meeting at global or international conferences elsewhere in Europe, North America, Singapore and places like that. So, there have been many more opportunities for Indian and Chinese scientists to interact but still very few students will come from China to do science in India or will go from India to do science in China. That remains, I mean for both countries you know the bench mark is still very much to get into the Germany the UK or the US right that remains the benchmark.
Vishal: Is it all about the benchmark or the historical rivalry mindset is also at play here because we are still stuck with the 1962 narrative?
Dr. Ghosh: I think you are totally right that the shadow the 1962 cast is a very long one. But in many areas the Chinese science and infrastructure have improved tremendously so they have left Indian science way behind to be honest. So, if you speak to scientists who traveled in China for conferences or gone to so sort of collaborate they are usually amazed at the kind of resources that have been thrown. Not in all universities but they have identified certain specific universities that received a vast majority of the spending but that is allowed in certain kind especially in lab sciences, experimental sciences they can do certain things that I think Indian scientists struggle to do. So, it’s not a capability issue it’s a capacity issue and this is something I think is a failure of the Indian state it’s not that Chinese have done great, the Chinese have responded as they should have, it’s the Indian state that I think has failed both Indian society and Indian Scientists in this.
Vishal: You being historian, how do you think is it possible to change the historical mindset through scientific interaction?
Dr. Ghosh: I think the way to think about a lot of this kind of research and this kind of activates is not to assume that any of them is going to be transformative but think of them as a building blocks. And, the idea is that you are trying to see further so if you have one brick you can stand on that brick and you will only be 3inch taller, right? But if you can bring a bunch of different bricks then you will actually have a platform or a wall and then suddenly you will see a lot further away so each of this individually doesn’t amount to much but together they can agree to begin to change perspectives and to your other point. I think you are right this a problem perhaps that’s become more acute in India where disciplinary divides are becoming very strong and actually in western academia now the reverse is happening where they are very consciously trying to break these divides down so that there is a relatively young discipline called science and technology studies which is only about 25-30 years old that’s a proper discipline there are people in history of science, scientists and historians interested in this questions but now it’s taken on the shape of discipline so it has its own problems. Every discipline will have its own blind spots and so on but the idea really is to recognize that science is a social enterprise and its embedded in society, its embedded in politics there is nothing because we still often have this view of science as being the sacrosanct very pure or something pursuit of truth. But what SPSS has shown and lot of other historian of science have shown that’s not the case at all, scientist are very much political actors they involve in their local politics and they can be just as petty and that pettiness can actually effect the science that actually emerges and science that we then later on assume to have true value . So I think that is very important and there are very good departments in India now also that pursue these perspectives but to have them is part of a broader debate perhaps needs still to happen it hasn’t happened as much as it should. Let me just add one quickie and the part of the problem I think is also because we have post-independence, in spite if you read Nehru he doesn’t have this perspective or nor do I think Patel and some of the other major leaders of that generation. This sort of emphasis on STEM what American call science and engineering that I think has led to a sort of devaluation of more humanistic and social science approaches to understand making society. Now we think that engineers can solve a problem because they can identify it and then have a clear path to its solution and that is I think something needs to be slowly rejected that we need to about this as inter-related, more comprehensive pursuits of social problems or you know other kinds of problems.
Vishal: Was Panchsheel an uneasy tie between India and China? And what pushed Nehru to make this agreement as early as he did?
Dr. Ghosh: This is a great question I haven’t looked at this as closely like the you know the signing of the treaty. What I will say is that we tend to emphasize Panchsheel so much at the expense of other things that are happening at that time. So there is actually a China-India trade treaty earlier that year but we don’t give as much emphasis because later on Panchsheel become so important in 1962 and so on. So I think we need to go back and reconstruct what the various imperatives at that time were and what the implications were for trade between China and India and so on so on; that’s one thing to bear in mind. The other thing I think is that Nehru, if you go back and read Discovery of India even if you read you know there have been compiled as a volume his letters to Chief Ministers, do you know about this volume? These letters are beautiful out of sheer interest you should read them may be even just aesthetic pleasure because they are just beautifully written but every two weeks he wrote very long letters six – seven page eight page letters to all the Chief Ministers in India trying to explain his thinking about what is going on both in India and in the world so this was his way of staying in touch with all the regional leaders that were helping him to govern India and, in that already it comes through very clearly how important he sees China’s role in the world is. So, I think it was a particular vision of diplomacy were he definitely saw India as a leader and he did so much in the 50s in particular to position India which didn’t have any military capacity at that point of claim or any kind of global leadership. But it was by virtue of him and not just him Vijay Lakshmi Pandit or other figures who were part of this effort. And, I think so he had a particular vision of how China needed to be brought into the global order and not be kept out so this was a diplomatic vision we can critic it but the vision was very much that China within the global order is the much better outcome than a China that is completely ostracized. So one way we can think about this is that he is trying to bring up the conditions whereby the Chinese can be part of a global community. We have to keep in mind what’s happening right before 1950, The Korean War starts and basically India is central to the negotiation if you go back and read this particular period of history you know that India was very much involved in trying to negotiate peace between the Chinese and the Soviets (Soviets by proxy), the Koreans and the Americans. The other interesting thing is that this happened at a time when the American and Chinese relationship completely falls apart so again if you go back and look at late 1940s, so by 1948 the Americans already have a sense that the Communists are going to win. They are not ecstatic about it but they make their peace with it and they were like we can leave with a Communist China ‘we will work with that but after 1950 things really start collapsing because of the Korean war so it’s in that context that Nehru I think is also being driven.
Vishal: Despite of knowing that China was taking an upper hand in the agreement what is the rationale behind your claim that it was a diplomatic solution?
Dr. Ghosh: Diplomatic solution is give and take. These are the kinds of things I think that the reason why we share these kinds of documents is to entice you to go and look, look at these materials, look at other materials, look at memos, there is probably a lot of disagreement internally right? To look which is the right way to proceed and then to figure out what other constrains were there. He wanted the treaty signed because he wanted perhaps peace in Tibet; he wanted a peaceful Northern Border immediately. He perhaps thought that everything was clear but from the Chinese perspective it was not clear, I mean it was clear from their perspective but in different way and I think that’s the other important thing to recognize about. So, I will give a very interesting example from slightly earlier period so as the Cheng Empire was expanding in the late 1600s and early 1700s they came up against the Russian empire in central Eurasia and which was also trying to expand so essentially you have two very large land based imperial powers that are now in contact to each other and the Ching and Russian Empire signed several important treaties in late 17th CE. I think the treaty of Nerchinsk in 1683 or something like that. The interesting thing about the negotiation is that the Chinese diplomat who went didn’t know Russian, the Russian representatives who arrived to negotiate the treaty didn’t know any Chinese. So, they brought along with them Chesney Missionaries because they were in China and knew Latin which then they could use as a medium of communication. This raises the question of language and negotiation which came up yesterday right? You have a Hindi version, a Chinese version and an English version of the treaty, right? So, these things again become hugely important. Who are the people, how is this being negotiated what words are being used? Al of this things I think need to be looked at very closely. One last thing I will say about this is, I think there is very interesting article by Nobarun Roy; it came out just last year- he teaches at South Asian University in Delhi and it’s looking at Nehru’s Diplomacy around China at this time so take a look at that, that will perhaps give you interesting a nice starting point to think about these questions.
Vishal Sengupta is a final year MA student in the Department of International Studies and History
Dr. Ghosh: Today I don’t know what’s the exact situation is, but there is a fair amount of contact. There are lot of Indian Scientists who travel to China, participate in all kinds of workshops, all kinds of collaborative activities and vice versa. Chinese people are coming to India also. It’s actually picked up a lot since the 80s and the episodes I am looking at are typically earlier in the 20th century. I don’t know how meaningful they have been, to be honest I just haven’t looked at it closely enough to know, but of course the other thing to remember is that they are not just meeting in each other’s country, they are often meeting at global or international conferences elsewhere in Europe, North America, Singapore and places like that. So, there have been many more opportunities for Indian and Chinese scientists to interact but still very few students will come from China to do science in India or will go from India to do science in China. That remains, I mean for both countries you know the bench mark is still very much to get into the Germany the UK or the US right that remains the benchmark.
Vishal: Is it all about the benchmark or the historical rivalry mindset is also at play here because we are still stuck with the 1962 narrative?
Dr. Ghosh: I think you are totally right that the shadow the 1962 cast is a very long one. But in many areas the Chinese science and infrastructure have improved tremendously so they have left Indian science way behind to be honest. So, if you speak to scientists who traveled in China for conferences or gone to so sort of collaborate they are usually amazed at the kind of resources that have been thrown. Not in all universities but they have identified certain specific universities that received a vast majority of the spending but that is allowed in certain kind especially in lab sciences, experimental sciences they can do certain things that I think Indian scientists struggle to do. So, it’s not a capability issue it’s a capacity issue and this is something I think is a failure of the Indian state it’s not that Chinese have done great, the Chinese have responded as they should have, it’s the Indian state that I think has failed both Indian society and Indian Scientists in this.
Vishal: You being historian, how do you think is it possible to change the historical mindset through scientific interaction?
Dr. Ghosh: I think the way to think about a lot of this kind of research and this kind of activates is not to assume that any of them is going to be transformative but think of them as a building blocks. And, the idea is that you are trying to see further so if you have one brick you can stand on that brick and you will only be 3inch taller, right? But if you can bring a bunch of different bricks then you will actually have a platform or a wall and then suddenly you will see a lot further away so each of this individually doesn’t amount to much but together they can agree to begin to change perspectives and to your other point. I think you are right this a problem perhaps that’s become more acute in India where disciplinary divides are becoming very strong and actually in western academia now the reverse is happening where they are very consciously trying to break these divides down so that there is a relatively young discipline called science and technology studies which is only about 25-30 years old that’s a proper discipline there are people in history of science, scientists and historians interested in this questions but now it’s taken on the shape of discipline so it has its own problems. Every discipline will have its own blind spots and so on but the idea really is to recognize that science is a social enterprise and its embedded in society, its embedded in politics there is nothing because we still often have this view of science as being the sacrosanct very pure or something pursuit of truth. But what SPSS has shown and lot of other historian of science have shown that’s not the case at all, scientist are very much political actors they involve in their local politics and they can be just as petty and that pettiness can actually effect the science that actually emerges and science that we then later on assume to have true value . So I think that is very important and there are very good departments in India now also that pursue these perspectives but to have them is part of a broader debate perhaps needs still to happen it hasn’t happened as much as it should. Let me just add one quickie and the part of the problem I think is also because we have post-independence, in spite if you read Nehru he doesn’t have this perspective or nor do I think Patel and some of the other major leaders of that generation. This sort of emphasis on STEM what American call science and engineering that I think has led to a sort of devaluation of more humanistic and social science approaches to understand making society. Now we think that engineers can solve a problem because they can identify it and then have a clear path to its solution and that is I think something needs to be slowly rejected that we need to about this as inter-related, more comprehensive pursuits of social problems or you know other kinds of problems.
Vishal: Was Panchsheel an uneasy tie between India and China? And what pushed Nehru to make this agreement as early as he did?
Dr. Ghosh: This is a great question I haven’t looked at this as closely like the you know the signing of the treaty. What I will say is that we tend to emphasize Panchsheel so much at the expense of other things that are happening at that time. So there is actually a China-India trade treaty earlier that year but we don’t give as much emphasis because later on Panchsheel become so important in 1962 and so on. So I think we need to go back and reconstruct what the various imperatives at that time were and what the implications were for trade between China and India and so on so on; that’s one thing to bear in mind. The other thing I think is that Nehru, if you go back and read Discovery of India even if you read you know there have been compiled as a volume his letters to Chief Ministers, do you know about this volume? These letters are beautiful out of sheer interest you should read them may be even just aesthetic pleasure because they are just beautifully written but every two weeks he wrote very long letters six – seven page eight page letters to all the Chief Ministers in India trying to explain his thinking about what is going on both in India and in the world so this was his way of staying in touch with all the regional leaders that were helping him to govern India and, in that already it comes through very clearly how important he sees China’s role in the world is. So, I think it was a particular vision of diplomacy were he definitely saw India as a leader and he did so much in the 50s in particular to position India which didn’t have any military capacity at that point of claim or any kind of global leadership. But it was by virtue of him and not just him Vijay Lakshmi Pandit or other figures who were part of this effort. And, I think so he had a particular vision of how China needed to be brought into the global order and not be kept out so this was a diplomatic vision we can critic it but the vision was very much that China within the global order is the much better outcome than a China that is completely ostracized. So one way we can think about this is that he is trying to bring up the conditions whereby the Chinese can be part of a global community. We have to keep in mind what’s happening right before 1950, The Korean War starts and basically India is central to the negotiation if you go back and read this particular period of history you know that India was very much involved in trying to negotiate peace between the Chinese and the Soviets (Soviets by proxy), the Koreans and the Americans. The other interesting thing is that this happened at a time when the American and Chinese relationship completely falls apart so again if you go back and look at late 1940s, so by 1948 the Americans already have a sense that the Communists are going to win. They are not ecstatic about it but they make their peace with it and they were like we can leave with a Communist China ‘we will work with that but after 1950 things really start collapsing because of the Korean war so it’s in that context that Nehru I think is also being driven.
Vishal: Despite of knowing that China was taking an upper hand in the agreement what is the rationale behind your claim that it was a diplomatic solution?
Dr. Ghosh: Diplomatic solution is give and take. These are the kinds of things I think that the reason why we share these kinds of documents is to entice you to go and look, look at these materials, look at other materials, look at memos, there is probably a lot of disagreement internally right? To look which is the right way to proceed and then to figure out what other constrains were there. He wanted the treaty signed because he wanted perhaps peace in Tibet; he wanted a peaceful Northern Border immediately. He perhaps thought that everything was clear but from the Chinese perspective it was not clear, I mean it was clear from their perspective but in different way and I think that’s the other important thing to recognize about. So, I will give a very interesting example from slightly earlier period so as the Cheng Empire was expanding in the late 1600s and early 1700s they came up against the Russian empire in central Eurasia and which was also trying to expand so essentially you have two very large land based imperial powers that are now in contact to each other and the Ching and Russian Empire signed several important treaties in late 17th CE. I think the treaty of Nerchinsk in 1683 or something like that. The interesting thing about the negotiation is that the Chinese diplomat who went didn’t know Russian, the Russian representatives who arrived to negotiate the treaty didn’t know any Chinese. So, they brought along with them Chesney Missionaries because they were in China and knew Latin which then they could use as a medium of communication. This raises the question of language and negotiation which came up yesterday right? You have a Hindi version, a Chinese version and an English version of the treaty, right? So, these things again become hugely important. Who are the people, how is this being negotiated what words are being used? Al of this things I think need to be looked at very closely. One last thing I will say about this is, I think there is very interesting article by Nobarun Roy; it came out just last year- he teaches at South Asian University in Delhi and it’s looking at Nehru’s Diplomacy around China at this time so take a look at that, that will perhaps give you interesting a nice starting point to think about these questions.
Vishal Sengupta is a final year MA student in the Department of International Studies and History
Understanding China from the Lenses of History
A Talk with Dr. Arunabh Ghosh,
Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History,
Harvard University-PART 2
Smritirekha Sarma Haloi
Q. Putting the overall discussions over the past two days in context, one can conclude that history has somewhere been sidetracked in the discourses of international relations. What according you is the best way to integrate history in the studies of international relations without both disciplines losing their own uniqueness?
Well that is a very relevant question and one has to address that at a curricular level in in terms of university programmes where there is a clear set of core courses and electives. People are going to have different interests so you have to cater to everyone’s interests. Someone may be interested in Chinese studies and some may be interested in Latin America and so on. So, you have to have electives. But course courses are equally important which may contain courses like international relations theory and at the same time some sort of a historical thinking which should be essentially taught by a historian. Yes, history is often blurry with facts but it is also important to understand how historians problematize these and have dealt with these kinds of problems and made their best efforts to make it relevant to the present. Having a sense of historical consciousness is very necessary. Because in international relations, the focus becomes more contemporary but having a degree of historical consciousness which allows you understand the current happenings will only make you a stronger IR scholar.
Q. India- China relations go back to many centuries and both the countries historically have very tightly connected linkages. But do you think those connections are strong enough in the contemporary times to forge a co-operative partnership between the two countries considering much of their relations are underpinned in suspicion and sourness?
I think that’s a big challenge but the important thing would be to diversify and broaden the ways in which these contacts are taking place. One way to do it is to have a better sense of history but the other way to do it is to have a broader engagement in the present. One knows about Indian films being popular in China but, there are certain Chinese films that are ought to be popular in India also but for some reason they did not get released. But, there was one film made a few years ago called Wǒ Bú Shì Yào Shén, literally meaning “I am not a God of Medicine”. It is a story of a guy who is essentially a quack and he has a small store in China and he claims himself to be an expert of Indian medicine. Then at some point he discovers a whole range of cancer patients looking out for cancer drugs but unable to afford them. Then he figures out that he can get the generic drugs from India and starts travelling to India and brings those drugs leading to a huge movement. These are issues that people can connect. Drug pricing is such a big issue in India too. So that kind of broader contact is really necessary. Of course there is state to state contact but there is a wider recognition of who we are and who they are. A broader perspective is required, for instance, reading a Chinese book or watching a Chinese movie which we have with America. So a bit of openness is I think very necessary and in terms of what the future holds, it is impossible to predict. But looking at the current trends globally, it is not very good because everywhere we are seeing the hardening nationalism and hardening boundaries which is a structural obstacle but it is difficult to prognosticate where it will lead.
Q. John Mearsheimer says that China’s aggressive behaviour in the international front today has a lot to do with its history especially the period of Japanese colonialism about which Iris Chang extensively divulges in her book The Rape of Nanking. Do you agree to it? Do you think China is still hung up over her bitter historical memories?
I think it’s a great question because it directly speaks to the value of history in some ways. How do we write this history, how do we understand it and in China this has been a huge project. It actually goes much further back. It actually starts with what we know as the Hundred Years of Humiliation and it all with the loss in the opium war and after the 1949 revolution there was a strive again in the sense that we were a great nation once and we need to be great again. Part of this history is much more complicated and this is a very simple deductive way of thinking about it. And that also brings me to the point that India’s experience of colonialism and China’s experience of colonialism is quite interesting to deconstruct these nationalist narratives. This narrative exists for a very specific reason because it serves the current Chinese state’s goal of power projection and it serves their sort of attempts to re-establish itself not just in East Asia but globally. So very consciously there has been a sentiment of we have been hurt, we have been abused etc. and this could start at the school level and it continues on which is why Japan particular today remains a hard-buttoned issue. If you want to distract the Chinese population, the way literally is to wreck up something about Japan. The grounds for that are that the recent Sino-Japanese history is definitely a bitter one but that particular narrative is right now serving as a state goal and it need not only be thought of in that context. When you look and India and China’s colonialism in comparative terms, certain interesting things emerge. Let me give you one example. If you look at music, music and nationalism actually have interesting connections because they can become strong markers of a national identity. In the Indian case, we can probably agree that India was much more deeply colonised than that of China was. Yes, there were foreign presence in different Chinese cities but there was not any direct governance across China as it was in India. But what is interesting is that in the 20th century various forms of classical music in India survived and thrived and are still very strong part of the Indian identity whether its Carnatic music or Hindustani music or various forms of dance. But, in China that is not the case until much more recently. So, in the 20s and 30s what you see is a dominance of Jazz and Opera because of Soviet influence. It is only recently that few things are getting revived for instance, traditional Chinese instruments etc. So this kind of narrative gives rise to the question about what the relation is between nationalism, colonialism and music. A place like China, which was not as deeply colonised as India could not retain its own musical traditions and the opposite is true in case of India. So in India there were various structures for instance, temples which patronised music but one needs to look at what was happening in China. What I am giving you is my speculative sense but this is an interesting history to try and understand as it becomes important I understanding both India and China and also colonialism and what kind of effects it have. And it also speaks about people’s everyday life because music is very intrinsic to live the experience.
Q. Do you think Mao Tsetung’s period is the reason behind this because he in a way completely discarded ancient Chinese philosophies like Confucianism and attacked traditions which he popularly called as “The Four Olds”?
Absolutely, I think you are quite right. Yes there was a constant attempt to reject Chinese culture and that could be a part of it. But China is a big country so we should not just assume that China can do it just like that. But I think you are right that it could one of the factors that could explain in some ways and that still does not explain why Jazz was such a huge thing in the 20s and 30s China, especially in Shanghai and some of the other cities. Jazz never really took off in India, maybe it’s a little bit there in Calcutta but it does not have a major role to play in India’s culture.
Q. In the contemporary discourses regarding India and China, it’s like there is a dichotomy and it looks like as if there exists two blocs—either Pro-China or Anti-China? Is it an appropriate way to approach China today?
No. Not at all. That is not the appropriate way to look at anything. What we are losing right now is an ability to deal with contradictions, contending forces and contending debates and to realise that a lot of life have been lived in that grey area. It is not lived in extremes of black or white, right or wrong, good or bad etc. And that’s why life is so challenging because that’s when you figure out what to do. Because in most case you will be denied an answer, you will be denied that this is the absolute right way to do things. People will say varied things and you yourself may never be sure about the right ways of doing things. And so having both approaches, that is, humility as well as a critical approach to understanding anything becomes usually important. I would like to mention about a particular interview clip from one of Satyajeet Ray’s movies from the 1970s which basically hinges on one question from the interview panel to this young boy What do you think is the most significant event of the past decade? I won’t give you the answer and I want you to look at it and see what the answer is. If you read Ray’s interview about what he was trying to capture in that character, this was the time of the Naxalite movement and the country was greatly polarised so there were people who were completely with the Maoists, the Naxalites and then there are ones who completely oppose. But the central figure is someone actually who is really very conflicted. He recognises that the Naxalites have a very strong argument to make about how unequal India is and how the problems are but he is not fully onboard with the all violence that it is suggesting. He also sees these divisions within his family. His brother is a Naxalite and his sister is completely in to the corporate world getting high paid salary and he is also sort of repulsed by it. So, it’s this conflict that defines the human condition right? Because the extremes are boring. In this case, the interviewers know what they are going to do, but it’s the character who has not decided, who is conflicted and who is trying to make the sense of the world and I would say this is also how we need to approach problems. We should really avoid that kind of framing—anti or pro and so on.
Q. About your upcoming book, “Making it count—statistics and statecraft in the early PRC (1949-1959)”—what has been your experiences in writing the book and why did you decide to write on this topic?
That question probably needs a long answer but I will try to give you a short version. Fundamentally the book is about trying to understand sort of the link between nation building and the role that data plays in nation building and the role that state plays in collecting the data. The reason that the particular time period is interesting because in 1949 the communists come to power in China with a clear intention of completely revolutionising Chinese society, Chinese culture, Chinese economy but they are communists so they are going to do it using planning like what Soviet Union had done. Except of course, planning presumes you have data. Planning is a fundamentally econometric exercise right? So then the question becomes how did they do it? Because in 1949, the country was decimated. It had gone through forty years of revolution, warlordism, internal strife, Japanese invasion and a civil war. So how did they do it? But more broadly as much I got in to this question, it became much more also the history of data itself and history of statistics and how essentially we think about any kind of research that we do we try to make an assessment how do we go about that and what kind of implicit assumptions embedded in matters that we chose. And I discovered that the 50s is an extremely interesting moment where lots of these debates play out. Let me give you an example. If you want to know how many students are there in Christ, there are a few different ways to do it right? You can do a census or you can average out by x number of students with y number of classes by choosing random samples. All the methods will give you results and depending on the context, one will be more accurate than the other. In small population, census may work but when you do a census of a country, it generates a lot of mistakes of various kinds. So people argue that doing a random sample of 1 per cent of the population is actually a much better indicator of what is going on in the country as long as it is a randomised sample and you are not cherry-picking your samples. And, embedded in these are ways that the society operates and the chance and the randomness as a part of the world and so on. So, quickly the book does not only become a book about statecraft in the narrow sense but how statecraft intercepts with this broader philosophical questions about the nature of the world. So that’s in short what the book is trying to do. Of course its embedded in what happened in China.
Q: Did you do archival research for the book?
Yes the book is almost entirely based on archival research, most of it in China and little bit in India and the US but about 90-95 per cent of archival work is in China.
Q. Did you come across any difficulties in gathering data from the archives?
So I was very lucky when I did my research. Things are a lot harder now. The archival situation has changed and this again speaks to about after Xi Xingping’s coming to power. It started earlier but it sort of accelerated after Xi Xingping’s coming to power. There has been a sort of greater control in the way the Central Government is trying to exert which includes archival access. This does not only apply to foreign scholars, this applies equally to Chinese scholars also. They are just as much under pressure to conform to certain things and they are not getting access to archives and this unfortunately another part of the reality of China Studies. So if I was doing my dissertation research now, it would be a very different book because I do not think I would have access to the same kind of materials.
Smritirekha Sarma Haloi is a final year MA student in the Department of International Studies and History
Q. Putting the overall discussions over the past two days in context, one can conclude that history has somewhere been sidetracked in the discourses of international relations. What according you is the best way to integrate history in the studies of international relations without both disciplines losing their own uniqueness?
Well that is a very relevant question and one has to address that at a curricular level in in terms of university programmes where there is a clear set of core courses and electives. People are going to have different interests so you have to cater to everyone’s interests. Someone may be interested in Chinese studies and some may be interested in Latin America and so on. So, you have to have electives. But course courses are equally important which may contain courses like international relations theory and at the same time some sort of a historical thinking which should be essentially taught by a historian. Yes, history is often blurry with facts but it is also important to understand how historians problematize these and have dealt with these kinds of problems and made their best efforts to make it relevant to the present. Having a sense of historical consciousness is very necessary. Because in international relations, the focus becomes more contemporary but having a degree of historical consciousness which allows you understand the current happenings will only make you a stronger IR scholar.
Q. India- China relations go back to many centuries and both the countries historically have very tightly connected linkages. But do you think those connections are strong enough in the contemporary times to forge a co-operative partnership between the two countries considering much of their relations are underpinned in suspicion and sourness?
I think that’s a big challenge but the important thing would be to diversify and broaden the ways in which these contacts are taking place. One way to do it is to have a better sense of history but the other way to do it is to have a broader engagement in the present. One knows about Indian films being popular in China but, there are certain Chinese films that are ought to be popular in India also but for some reason they did not get released. But, there was one film made a few years ago called Wǒ Bú Shì Yào Shén, literally meaning “I am not a God of Medicine”. It is a story of a guy who is essentially a quack and he has a small store in China and he claims himself to be an expert of Indian medicine. Then at some point he discovers a whole range of cancer patients looking out for cancer drugs but unable to afford them. Then he figures out that he can get the generic drugs from India and starts travelling to India and brings those drugs leading to a huge movement. These are issues that people can connect. Drug pricing is such a big issue in India too. So that kind of broader contact is really necessary. Of course there is state to state contact but there is a wider recognition of who we are and who they are. A broader perspective is required, for instance, reading a Chinese book or watching a Chinese movie which we have with America. So a bit of openness is I think very necessary and in terms of what the future holds, it is impossible to predict. But looking at the current trends globally, it is not very good because everywhere we are seeing the hardening nationalism and hardening boundaries which is a structural obstacle but it is difficult to prognosticate where it will lead.
Q. John Mearsheimer says that China’s aggressive behaviour in the international front today has a lot to do with its history especially the period of Japanese colonialism about which Iris Chang extensively divulges in her book The Rape of Nanking. Do you agree to it? Do you think China is still hung up over her bitter historical memories?
I think it’s a great question because it directly speaks to the value of history in some ways. How do we write this history, how do we understand it and in China this has been a huge project. It actually goes much further back. It actually starts with what we know as the Hundred Years of Humiliation and it all with the loss in the opium war and after the 1949 revolution there was a strive again in the sense that we were a great nation once and we need to be great again. Part of this history is much more complicated and this is a very simple deductive way of thinking about it. And that also brings me to the point that India’s experience of colonialism and China’s experience of colonialism is quite interesting to deconstruct these nationalist narratives. This narrative exists for a very specific reason because it serves the current Chinese state’s goal of power projection and it serves their sort of attempts to re-establish itself not just in East Asia but globally. So very consciously there has been a sentiment of we have been hurt, we have been abused etc. and this could start at the school level and it continues on which is why Japan particular today remains a hard-buttoned issue. If you want to distract the Chinese population, the way literally is to wreck up something about Japan. The grounds for that are that the recent Sino-Japanese history is definitely a bitter one but that particular narrative is right now serving as a state goal and it need not only be thought of in that context. When you look and India and China’s colonialism in comparative terms, certain interesting things emerge. Let me give you one example. If you look at music, music and nationalism actually have interesting connections because they can become strong markers of a national identity. In the Indian case, we can probably agree that India was much more deeply colonised than that of China was. Yes, there were foreign presence in different Chinese cities but there was not any direct governance across China as it was in India. But what is interesting is that in the 20th century various forms of classical music in India survived and thrived and are still very strong part of the Indian identity whether its Carnatic music or Hindustani music or various forms of dance. But, in China that is not the case until much more recently. So, in the 20s and 30s what you see is a dominance of Jazz and Opera because of Soviet influence. It is only recently that few things are getting revived for instance, traditional Chinese instruments etc. So this kind of narrative gives rise to the question about what the relation is between nationalism, colonialism and music. A place like China, which was not as deeply colonised as India could not retain its own musical traditions and the opposite is true in case of India. So in India there were various structures for instance, temples which patronised music but one needs to look at what was happening in China. What I am giving you is my speculative sense but this is an interesting history to try and understand as it becomes important I understanding both India and China and also colonialism and what kind of effects it have. And it also speaks about people’s everyday life because music is very intrinsic to live the experience.
Q. Do you think Mao Tsetung’s period is the reason behind this because he in a way completely discarded ancient Chinese philosophies like Confucianism and attacked traditions which he popularly called as “The Four Olds”?
Absolutely, I think you are quite right. Yes there was a constant attempt to reject Chinese culture and that could be a part of it. But China is a big country so we should not just assume that China can do it just like that. But I think you are right that it could one of the factors that could explain in some ways and that still does not explain why Jazz was such a huge thing in the 20s and 30s China, especially in Shanghai and some of the other cities. Jazz never really took off in India, maybe it’s a little bit there in Calcutta but it does not have a major role to play in India’s culture.
Q. In the contemporary discourses regarding India and China, it’s like there is a dichotomy and it looks like as if there exists two blocs—either Pro-China or Anti-China? Is it an appropriate way to approach China today?
No. Not at all. That is not the appropriate way to look at anything. What we are losing right now is an ability to deal with contradictions, contending forces and contending debates and to realise that a lot of life have been lived in that grey area. It is not lived in extremes of black or white, right or wrong, good or bad etc. And that’s why life is so challenging because that’s when you figure out what to do. Because in most case you will be denied an answer, you will be denied that this is the absolute right way to do things. People will say varied things and you yourself may never be sure about the right ways of doing things. And so having both approaches, that is, humility as well as a critical approach to understanding anything becomes usually important. I would like to mention about a particular interview clip from one of Satyajeet Ray’s movies from the 1970s which basically hinges on one question from the interview panel to this young boy What do you think is the most significant event of the past decade? I won’t give you the answer and I want you to look at it and see what the answer is. If you read Ray’s interview about what he was trying to capture in that character, this was the time of the Naxalite movement and the country was greatly polarised so there were people who were completely with the Maoists, the Naxalites and then there are ones who completely oppose. But the central figure is someone actually who is really very conflicted. He recognises that the Naxalites have a very strong argument to make about how unequal India is and how the problems are but he is not fully onboard with the all violence that it is suggesting. He also sees these divisions within his family. His brother is a Naxalite and his sister is completely in to the corporate world getting high paid salary and he is also sort of repulsed by it. So, it’s this conflict that defines the human condition right? Because the extremes are boring. In this case, the interviewers know what they are going to do, but it’s the character who has not decided, who is conflicted and who is trying to make the sense of the world and I would say this is also how we need to approach problems. We should really avoid that kind of framing—anti or pro and so on.
Q. About your upcoming book, “Making it count—statistics and statecraft in the early PRC (1949-1959)”—what has been your experiences in writing the book and why did you decide to write on this topic?
That question probably needs a long answer but I will try to give you a short version. Fundamentally the book is about trying to understand sort of the link between nation building and the role that data plays in nation building and the role that state plays in collecting the data. The reason that the particular time period is interesting because in 1949 the communists come to power in China with a clear intention of completely revolutionising Chinese society, Chinese culture, Chinese economy but they are communists so they are going to do it using planning like what Soviet Union had done. Except of course, planning presumes you have data. Planning is a fundamentally econometric exercise right? So then the question becomes how did they do it? Because in 1949, the country was decimated. It had gone through forty years of revolution, warlordism, internal strife, Japanese invasion and a civil war. So how did they do it? But more broadly as much I got in to this question, it became much more also the history of data itself and history of statistics and how essentially we think about any kind of research that we do we try to make an assessment how do we go about that and what kind of implicit assumptions embedded in matters that we chose. And I discovered that the 50s is an extremely interesting moment where lots of these debates play out. Let me give you an example. If you want to know how many students are there in Christ, there are a few different ways to do it right? You can do a census or you can average out by x number of students with y number of classes by choosing random samples. All the methods will give you results and depending on the context, one will be more accurate than the other. In small population, census may work but when you do a census of a country, it generates a lot of mistakes of various kinds. So people argue that doing a random sample of 1 per cent of the population is actually a much better indicator of what is going on in the country as long as it is a randomised sample and you are not cherry-picking your samples. And, embedded in these are ways that the society operates and the chance and the randomness as a part of the world and so on. So, quickly the book does not only become a book about statecraft in the narrow sense but how statecraft intercepts with this broader philosophical questions about the nature of the world. So that’s in short what the book is trying to do. Of course its embedded in what happened in China.
Q: Did you do archival research for the book?
Yes the book is almost entirely based on archival research, most of it in China and little bit in India and the US but about 90-95 per cent of archival work is in China.
Q. Did you come across any difficulties in gathering data from the archives?
So I was very lucky when I did my research. Things are a lot harder now. The archival situation has changed and this again speaks to about after Xi Xingping’s coming to power. It started earlier but it sort of accelerated after Xi Xingping’s coming to power. There has been a sort of greater control in the way the Central Government is trying to exert which includes archival access. This does not only apply to foreign scholars, this applies equally to Chinese scholars also. They are just as much under pressure to conform to certain things and they are not getting access to archives and this unfortunately another part of the reality of China Studies. So if I was doing my dissertation research now, it would be a very different book because I do not think I would have access to the same kind of materials.
Smritirekha Sarma Haloi is a final year MA student in the Department of International Studies and History
Interview with Dr Tansen Sen
Professor of History, New York University, Shanghai
Lakshmi Karlekar
Lakshmi Karlekar: Respected Sir, I am Lakshmi Karlekar studying in 1 MAIS bearing Register Number 1957330 at Christ (Deemed to be University). The interview is being conducted on 20-1-2020 at 4.19pm at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. I thank you Sir for accepting my request for the interview. To begin with the questionnaire, at first, I would like to ask you about your experience being the co-editor of Beyond Pan – Asianism connecting China and India?
Dr Tansen Sen: Ok. This is part of a project we had with Professor at Polytechnic University in Hong Kong on of the first half of the 20th century focussing on the Archival Sources in India and China about Guomin Dang period of India and China connections because we thought that period was not well studied especially by looking at what is in the Archives. So, it was a joint project funded by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (蔣經國國際學術交流基金會) in Taiwan. It was a three-year project and it was a collaboration among different scholars. So we look at the Archives in India, China and in London to look at different ways in which India and China connected from 1911 to 1949. So, the book is the outcome of the research we have had.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir what do you think about the relevance of Pan -Asianism in the 20th century?
Dr Tansen Sen: So in 20th century Pan- Asianism started around 1900-1903. It was initiated by the Japanese intellectual called - Okakura who first proposed the idea of bringing Japan, India and China together but it had a very nationalist idea as well which was to promote the Japanese contribution to bringing Asia together and that had a huge impact later on because it was incorporated by the Japanese military when it started expanding. So this is early 20th century period. So then Indian and Chinese intellectuals removed Japan out of it. And it became a China-India Pan-Asianism. Rabindranath Tagore was a part of it. The number of Chinese intellectuals like Zhang Taiyan was there. So they promoted this idea of India China connection drawing from the early Buddhist connections between China and India. But that too failed and I am going to talk about that in my lecture with the reference to Indo-China War in 1962. So, you have a kind of Pan Asianism that became very militaristic or stalled by military events which did not succeed. So, when you ask about Pan Asianism in the 21st century people do not understand the failure of the first Pan Asianism. So, we should be cautious about talking Pan Asianism especially if Asia does not include other parts of Asia especially Middle East or West Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia. Then if we are going to talk about Pan Asianism in 21st century, we perhaps have to talk about Asia as a whole and see what actually connects Asian countries and that’s the difficult part. There is not a single thing that seems to bring Asia together other than the geography and the geography itself is a construct by the Westerners. so 21st century has to go beyond those kinds of trends and try to see if there is a single unifying factor in Asia. so the Pan part of Asia - what is that Pan? So it is difficult.
Dr Barnali Chanda: Sir, since you mentioned about China India and the War and the connected history. Can you just talk about the book? It is really nice that how you are looking at the contacts, convergences and comparisons at the same time and how it is going to redefine the idea of India and China relations. Can you please talk about it?
Dr Tansen Sen: So the book “India, China and the World – A Connected History” was in a way cautioning this Pan Asianism idea and argument is that also towards that if you really look at connections, connectivity usually through movement of people, ideas, knowledge, objects. It goes beyond Asia and that’s why the World part in the title because often the case is that things beyond Asia are involved and seen as Asia connections and so I looked at for example the circulation of knowledge that goes beyond Asia. Europe is intimately involved in that, either in the spread of knowledge or as an intervening force in the knowledge circulation. so that’s why I argued in this book that if we want to look at the space of anything, we have to go beyond not only India, China but also Asia itself. So that was the essential argument of the book. we can’t really do India China on their own and so I looked at for example the circulation of scientific knowledge or knowledge about different kinds of technologies, ship building or others or even circulation of ideas, Buddhism, Islam. They actually go beyond these kinds of geographical constraints. So, arguing against geography as a construct was the purpose. so that’s the idea of the book.
Dr Barnali Chanda: Sir how important it is to read the history of India-China and the connections to understand international relations and especially foreign policy which we do a lot these days. The IR and Political science departments in India are mostly into foreign policy, conflict study, security study. So, can you please tell us more about the importance of learning History in this context.
Dr Tansen Sen: So, the notion of connected history actually was proposed by an historian called Sanjay Subramanyam who showed how various things across the world are connected. So historically, so movement of stories, movement of objects. So that was his notion that we should look at the connected history and clearly from a geo-political point of view, things were extremely connected like you can see that what happens on one part of the world has impact on other parts of the world. So, one example is the Opium War, right? So, Opium War for China is a major event and it shaped the history of China for the next century or so right? So why did it happen. It was because of the demand of tea in Europe, especially in England, leading to the introduction of opium and then leading them into war in 1840s. So historically if you want to look at the 19th century, International Relation, as a discipline, is connected to the connected history of the world. So, I think that continues even today. So, the last part of my book actually is about post-1949 connected history where international relations between India and China cannot be studied for example without looking at Pakistan or looking at other places in Asia or the United States. These play an important role in India-China relations. So, India China relations are just not bilateral, it is multilateral. So, we can see that in various kinds of organizations that have come up like BRICS, SCO organizations. So, these are multilateral organizations. These are indications that even today bilateral issues have to be somehow have to be discussed in multilateral forum and that is basically the connected history. So that is why has Brazil, why have South Africa, why have Russia, why have USA, so that’s the idea. That is why my argument is India-China connections historical or contemporary are related to the global issues and that’s why we have to look more into it.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir what role do you think the South East Asian countries and West Asian countries play between the India China equation?
Dr Tansen Sen: South East Asia is quite easy because South East Asia geographically is between India and China. So it connects India and China in many different ways. So even like a small state like Singapore plays an important role for negotiations between India and China but more importantly the traffic of various commodities goes through South East Asia where Singapore is a place where oil goes through, various kinds of other resources go through, commodities go through. so it is a conduit between India and China but Singapore also plays an important role in the negotiations between India and China, military leaders go and talk. so various kinds of forums are held in Singapore. So that’s why it’s a place where traffic goes through, it’s a place where talks happen. So that’s why South East Asia is important. There is another factor with South East Asia. It’s because there are large number of Chinese and Indian migrants in South East Asia. So, they also matter in various ways and I also think South East Asia as a place is quite important for many different reasons. Middle East is important historically and contemporary as well because Islam is where Saudi Arabia is where Haj takes place right. So, you have Indian Muslims, Chinese Muslims going there. So that region, Indians and Chinese together but politically it is important. This is where oil comes from resources come from so both China and India try to have connections with middle east countries, but specially So Middle East is now Israel. So, we usually forget the importance of Israel in connecting both India and China through supply of weapons but also a place where middle East is examined through the perspective of Israel. So initially neither India nor China recognise Israel but now Israel has become an important ally for both China and India. So that one common thing between India and China, the importance of Israel. So that’s why Middle East has to be looked at especially the role of Israel, the Palestinian issue, the oil issues. So Middle East matters in many different as well. So geographically it is not between India and China.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Yes sir
Dr Tansen Sen: But it still matters right.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir with India, China and Pakistan relations being viewed in suspicion, do you think Pan Asianism will exist and will it be carried forward in this particular era?
Dr Tansen Sen: I don’t think Pan Asianism will succeed any time so I think as problem this is what I am going to talk about day after tomorrow is when nation states are concerned with territories, Pan Asianism cannot succeed, so we have to go beyond territories in order to have Pan Asianism play a role, so that was a vision of Tagore. That was the vision of Liang Qichao that was the vision of these people who initially come up with the idea of Pan Asianism is a world without quarrels. Ah but that is not going to happen.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir your comments regarding the BRI, whether India should join it or not join it?
Dr Tansen Sen: BRI also has state relation especially the CPEC part which goes to a disputed territory so unless that is resolved I don’t think India should be a part of it because it has territorial implications and the other issues involved with regard to economic aspects that it has not been clarified by the Chinese government. They have spoken in many different ways but the clear goal of the BRI is not laid out.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, the dynamics of China’s digital surveillance of people. Do you think it is a harm on their privacy?
Dr Tansen Sen: It is happening in India as well so this is again a state imposed these kinds of facial recognition, digital influences, internet blockages. China is just one of these nations but you know Google does it, Facebook does it, so it’s not just a state’s initiative, so it has to be looked as holistically how companies and states are involved in these kinds of state limitations, restrictions and we should be careful not blaming one state and I think China does it for different reasons. China does it to restrict access to information and they would say that it’s to maintain peace and harmony within China. So, for them it is a valid reason but it restricts the knowledge of some people about even what is happening in even within China. But eventually it is not a good thing but ultimate thing is that it should be that it should be open. People should determine what is fake news, what is not fake news, what kind of information they believe in, more they encounter information, the better it is and it is up to the individual to find out what they want to believe to.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, what is China’s initiative towards sustainable technology, the current one?
Dr Tansen Sen: Solar Power have done well and it is amazing the kind of technology that they have created and this relates to coming up with alternate source of energy and for the development of China, energy is required so they have coal as an issue as it causes environmental problems. They have looked into nuclear energy, there drop in oil but the solar power is quite important part of their energy needs and they have created different institutions to look into solar power, even wind power which has developed in China by as well, but in recent years, what they are investing in is artificial intelligence and this is a state operation joint venture. They have realised that artificial intelligence is the next technological breakthrough that they want to engage in so there will be a rapid development in artificial intelligence. This leads to facial recognition, relates to surveillance of people, it also leads to technological breakthroughs and the final one is the 5G which is telecommunication wise is again something which other countries have not been able to provide in large scale, so 5G has been introduced in China now. They want to introduce it in India and other places, so technologically they have done quite well. And it relates to a very important factor why the Chinese universities are ranked so highly because they have invested in education on technology so many of these industries became in reach while have really developed their scientific technology so it has come to the course of neglecting humanities, social sciences but technological, they have really invested in colleges and industries. So, they have got in this education and man power to education. They still depend on US in many cases but in the next 10-15 years they might surpass US.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir with the current trade war happening between China and US do you think the world is moving towards a unipolar world?
Dr Tansen Sen: I don’t think they can move towards unipolar world that is difficult because that situation is difficult and different in different places. US can’t be a single power, China can’t be a single power. Russia is there well, India has its own aspiration, so this geo political situation will be very difficult to be single power in the world.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, can you comment on the Uyghur Muslims and how their condition is especially in the educational camps?
Dr Tansen Sen: Ya, so this is something that we know very little about from within China. There are a number of documents that have come out but one of the questions people need to ask is why is the Chinese government doing this, what is the fear. Is the fear about relation, ethnicity, territory may be all of those combined but they were clearly stuck by the terrorist activities that did let’s say violent activities that took place in different parts of China and maybe the reaction has been too excessive and what they are trying to do, what is their long-term plan is not very clear. I don’t think even the Chinese government knows how long this will continue, how well thought this plan is, we are not sure. It compares to some things that’s happened in Tibet but this is a different situation because the fear is also the international terrorists groups ISIS and how eastern Turkistan and how perhaps the Uyghur can get involved in that so some of it may be just fear without any evidence but people would call it ethnic genocide, cultural genocide and I think that has some truth to it and if reports about the secession of Mosque is true then it is clearly a case of cultural genocide but there is more local issues as well which is the disparity between the Uyghurs and the Han people which is more localised, economic problem and I am sure it is more complicated than congested educational camps. There are multiple issues and I think that needs to be understood.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir what is the take of China regarding the Trade War between Japan and South Korea?
Dr Tansen Sen: Well, they have been recent talks about that China, Korea and Japan. I think China has issues with Japan, China has issues with Korea, so they would not want to get into multi-lateral things again. So, they would have rather have Korea and Japan solve the issues themselves, but that’s not a big thing for China, I don’t think so. I think that US Trade War is more important for them.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, do you think China support to North Korea is like a hindrance factor to US as to not achieve the global power?
Dr Tansen Sen: I don’t think even China knows what’s happening in North Korea. So, I think what has happened in the past, China has been really supportive of multi-lateral talks and bringing North Korea into some kind of discussion with other countries because it does not want a nuclear war next to its border. So, it has tried to control Kim Jong Un a number of times but he has his own mind so that the idea that somehow PRC controls North Korea is somehow not right and North Korea has its own way of doing things. It is dependent on PRC in a number of ways but it has its own policies as well.
Lakshmi Karlekar: So, China is facing problems like some solution to population and they are not agreeing to situations like they are not compelling to the orders of ICJ in South China dispute. So, what kind of order is China trying to maintain and what kind of view is China giving to the entire world?
Dr Tansen Sen: Every country has its natural interest. They will do, India has its national interest, right. So, I don’t think it’s surprising that China does things that benefits them. That’s the first thing they have to do. Population is a different issue. Population in China has a huge demographic problem because shortly the labour forces decline, so in order of GDP growth and economic development you have to have a labour force and if you have an ageing population who is going to support them so that’s the reason they had to change the one-child policy. But the demographic problem is quite important and one of the things China does is that it thinks on long term and comes up with different ways to do that. Pollution also I think is a big issue but as you know the most polluted city is Delhi. So, they have taken steps to address to reduce the pollution issue and then this will lead to the use of solar power so as they get rid of coal energy. Shanghai, I can tell you has improved tremendously in the last three years. That has not happened in Delhi or Kolkata. So, they are dealing with it. It will take time. But the problem which China is not these things alone it is that people cannot voice their position to the policies right so they may not like the policies. But that kind of civil society, state dialogue really does not exist. The role of civil society is a major problem and that relates to MeToo, pollution and many other things. I think civil society has an important role in society and if you are trying to block that it is not good in the long term. And it can’t be state driven. Thanks.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Thank you Sir for your time and cooperation.
Dr Tansen Sen: You’re welcome.
Lakshmi Karlekar is a first year MA student in the Department of International Studies and History, CHRIST(Deemed To Be University)
Lakshmi Karlekar: Respected Sir, I am Lakshmi Karlekar studying in 1 MAIS bearing Register Number 1957330 at Christ (Deemed to be University). The interview is being conducted on 20-1-2020 at 4.19pm at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. I thank you Sir for accepting my request for the interview. To begin with the questionnaire, at first, I would like to ask you about your experience being the co-editor of Beyond Pan – Asianism connecting China and India?
Dr Tansen Sen: Ok. This is part of a project we had with Professor at Polytechnic University in Hong Kong on of the first half of the 20th century focussing on the Archival Sources in India and China about Guomin Dang period of India and China connections because we thought that period was not well studied especially by looking at what is in the Archives. So, it was a joint project funded by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (蔣經國國際學術交流基金會) in Taiwan. It was a three-year project and it was a collaboration among different scholars. So we look at the Archives in India, China and in London to look at different ways in which India and China connected from 1911 to 1949. So, the book is the outcome of the research we have had.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir what do you think about the relevance of Pan -Asianism in the 20th century?
Dr Tansen Sen: So in 20th century Pan- Asianism started around 1900-1903. It was initiated by the Japanese intellectual called - Okakura who first proposed the idea of bringing Japan, India and China together but it had a very nationalist idea as well which was to promote the Japanese contribution to bringing Asia together and that had a huge impact later on because it was incorporated by the Japanese military when it started expanding. So this is early 20th century period. So then Indian and Chinese intellectuals removed Japan out of it. And it became a China-India Pan-Asianism. Rabindranath Tagore was a part of it. The number of Chinese intellectuals like Zhang Taiyan was there. So they promoted this idea of India China connection drawing from the early Buddhist connections between China and India. But that too failed and I am going to talk about that in my lecture with the reference to Indo-China War in 1962. So, you have a kind of Pan Asianism that became very militaristic or stalled by military events which did not succeed. So, when you ask about Pan Asianism in the 21st century people do not understand the failure of the first Pan Asianism. So, we should be cautious about talking Pan Asianism especially if Asia does not include other parts of Asia especially Middle East or West Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia. Then if we are going to talk about Pan Asianism in 21st century, we perhaps have to talk about Asia as a whole and see what actually connects Asian countries and that’s the difficult part. There is not a single thing that seems to bring Asia together other than the geography and the geography itself is a construct by the Westerners. so 21st century has to go beyond those kinds of trends and try to see if there is a single unifying factor in Asia. so the Pan part of Asia - what is that Pan? So it is difficult.
Dr Barnali Chanda: Sir, since you mentioned about China India and the War and the connected history. Can you just talk about the book? It is really nice that how you are looking at the contacts, convergences and comparisons at the same time and how it is going to redefine the idea of India and China relations. Can you please talk about it?
Dr Tansen Sen: So the book “India, China and the World – A Connected History” was in a way cautioning this Pan Asianism idea and argument is that also towards that if you really look at connections, connectivity usually through movement of people, ideas, knowledge, objects. It goes beyond Asia and that’s why the World part in the title because often the case is that things beyond Asia are involved and seen as Asia connections and so I looked at for example the circulation of knowledge that goes beyond Asia. Europe is intimately involved in that, either in the spread of knowledge or as an intervening force in the knowledge circulation. so that’s why I argued in this book that if we want to look at the space of anything, we have to go beyond not only India, China but also Asia itself. So that was the essential argument of the book. we can’t really do India China on their own and so I looked at for example the circulation of scientific knowledge or knowledge about different kinds of technologies, ship building or others or even circulation of ideas, Buddhism, Islam. They actually go beyond these kinds of geographical constraints. So, arguing against geography as a construct was the purpose. so that’s the idea of the book.
Dr Barnali Chanda: Sir how important it is to read the history of India-China and the connections to understand international relations and especially foreign policy which we do a lot these days. The IR and Political science departments in India are mostly into foreign policy, conflict study, security study. So, can you please tell us more about the importance of learning History in this context.
Dr Tansen Sen: So, the notion of connected history actually was proposed by an historian called Sanjay Subramanyam who showed how various things across the world are connected. So historically, so movement of stories, movement of objects. So that was his notion that we should look at the connected history and clearly from a geo-political point of view, things were extremely connected like you can see that what happens on one part of the world has impact on other parts of the world. So, one example is the Opium War, right? So, Opium War for China is a major event and it shaped the history of China for the next century or so right? So why did it happen. It was because of the demand of tea in Europe, especially in England, leading to the introduction of opium and then leading them into war in 1840s. So historically if you want to look at the 19th century, International Relation, as a discipline, is connected to the connected history of the world. So, I think that continues even today. So, the last part of my book actually is about post-1949 connected history where international relations between India and China cannot be studied for example without looking at Pakistan or looking at other places in Asia or the United States. These play an important role in India-China relations. So, India China relations are just not bilateral, it is multilateral. So, we can see that in various kinds of organizations that have come up like BRICS, SCO organizations. So, these are multilateral organizations. These are indications that even today bilateral issues have to be somehow have to be discussed in multilateral forum and that is basically the connected history. So that is why has Brazil, why have South Africa, why have Russia, why have USA, so that’s the idea. That is why my argument is India-China connections historical or contemporary are related to the global issues and that’s why we have to look more into it.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir what role do you think the South East Asian countries and West Asian countries play between the India China equation?
Dr Tansen Sen: South East Asia is quite easy because South East Asia geographically is between India and China. So it connects India and China in many different ways. So even like a small state like Singapore plays an important role for negotiations between India and China but more importantly the traffic of various commodities goes through South East Asia where Singapore is a place where oil goes through, various kinds of other resources go through, commodities go through. so it is a conduit between India and China but Singapore also plays an important role in the negotiations between India and China, military leaders go and talk. so various kinds of forums are held in Singapore. So that’s why it’s a place where traffic goes through, it’s a place where talks happen. So that’s why South East Asia is important. There is another factor with South East Asia. It’s because there are large number of Chinese and Indian migrants in South East Asia. So, they also matter in various ways and I also think South East Asia as a place is quite important for many different reasons. Middle East is important historically and contemporary as well because Islam is where Saudi Arabia is where Haj takes place right. So, you have Indian Muslims, Chinese Muslims going there. So that region, Indians and Chinese together but politically it is important. This is where oil comes from resources come from so both China and India try to have connections with middle east countries, but specially So Middle East is now Israel. So, we usually forget the importance of Israel in connecting both India and China through supply of weapons but also a place where middle East is examined through the perspective of Israel. So initially neither India nor China recognise Israel but now Israel has become an important ally for both China and India. So that one common thing between India and China, the importance of Israel. So that’s why Middle East has to be looked at especially the role of Israel, the Palestinian issue, the oil issues. So Middle East matters in many different as well. So geographically it is not between India and China.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Yes sir
Dr Tansen Sen: But it still matters right.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir with India, China and Pakistan relations being viewed in suspicion, do you think Pan Asianism will exist and will it be carried forward in this particular era?
Dr Tansen Sen: I don’t think Pan Asianism will succeed any time so I think as problem this is what I am going to talk about day after tomorrow is when nation states are concerned with territories, Pan Asianism cannot succeed, so we have to go beyond territories in order to have Pan Asianism play a role, so that was a vision of Tagore. That was the vision of Liang Qichao that was the vision of these people who initially come up with the idea of Pan Asianism is a world without quarrels. Ah but that is not going to happen.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir your comments regarding the BRI, whether India should join it or not join it?
Dr Tansen Sen: BRI also has state relation especially the CPEC part which goes to a disputed territory so unless that is resolved I don’t think India should be a part of it because it has territorial implications and the other issues involved with regard to economic aspects that it has not been clarified by the Chinese government. They have spoken in many different ways but the clear goal of the BRI is not laid out.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, the dynamics of China’s digital surveillance of people. Do you think it is a harm on their privacy?
Dr Tansen Sen: It is happening in India as well so this is again a state imposed these kinds of facial recognition, digital influences, internet blockages. China is just one of these nations but you know Google does it, Facebook does it, so it’s not just a state’s initiative, so it has to be looked as holistically how companies and states are involved in these kinds of state limitations, restrictions and we should be careful not blaming one state and I think China does it for different reasons. China does it to restrict access to information and they would say that it’s to maintain peace and harmony within China. So, for them it is a valid reason but it restricts the knowledge of some people about even what is happening in even within China. But eventually it is not a good thing but ultimate thing is that it should be that it should be open. People should determine what is fake news, what is not fake news, what kind of information they believe in, more they encounter information, the better it is and it is up to the individual to find out what they want to believe to.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, what is China’s initiative towards sustainable technology, the current one?
Dr Tansen Sen: Solar Power have done well and it is amazing the kind of technology that they have created and this relates to coming up with alternate source of energy and for the development of China, energy is required so they have coal as an issue as it causes environmental problems. They have looked into nuclear energy, there drop in oil but the solar power is quite important part of their energy needs and they have created different institutions to look into solar power, even wind power which has developed in China by as well, but in recent years, what they are investing in is artificial intelligence and this is a state operation joint venture. They have realised that artificial intelligence is the next technological breakthrough that they want to engage in so there will be a rapid development in artificial intelligence. This leads to facial recognition, relates to surveillance of people, it also leads to technological breakthroughs and the final one is the 5G which is telecommunication wise is again something which other countries have not been able to provide in large scale, so 5G has been introduced in China now. They want to introduce it in India and other places, so technologically they have done quite well. And it relates to a very important factor why the Chinese universities are ranked so highly because they have invested in education on technology so many of these industries became in reach while have really developed their scientific technology so it has come to the course of neglecting humanities, social sciences but technological, they have really invested in colleges and industries. So, they have got in this education and man power to education. They still depend on US in many cases but in the next 10-15 years they might surpass US.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir with the current trade war happening between China and US do you think the world is moving towards a unipolar world?
Dr Tansen Sen: I don’t think they can move towards unipolar world that is difficult because that situation is difficult and different in different places. US can’t be a single power, China can’t be a single power. Russia is there well, India has its own aspiration, so this geo political situation will be very difficult to be single power in the world.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, can you comment on the Uyghur Muslims and how their condition is especially in the educational camps?
Dr Tansen Sen: Ya, so this is something that we know very little about from within China. There are a number of documents that have come out but one of the questions people need to ask is why is the Chinese government doing this, what is the fear. Is the fear about relation, ethnicity, territory may be all of those combined but they were clearly stuck by the terrorist activities that did let’s say violent activities that took place in different parts of China and maybe the reaction has been too excessive and what they are trying to do, what is their long-term plan is not very clear. I don’t think even the Chinese government knows how long this will continue, how well thought this plan is, we are not sure. It compares to some things that’s happened in Tibet but this is a different situation because the fear is also the international terrorists groups ISIS and how eastern Turkistan and how perhaps the Uyghur can get involved in that so some of it may be just fear without any evidence but people would call it ethnic genocide, cultural genocide and I think that has some truth to it and if reports about the secession of Mosque is true then it is clearly a case of cultural genocide but there is more local issues as well which is the disparity between the Uyghurs and the Han people which is more localised, economic problem and I am sure it is more complicated than congested educational camps. There are multiple issues and I think that needs to be understood.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir what is the take of China regarding the Trade War between Japan and South Korea?
Dr Tansen Sen: Well, they have been recent talks about that China, Korea and Japan. I think China has issues with Japan, China has issues with Korea, so they would not want to get into multi-lateral things again. So, they would have rather have Korea and Japan solve the issues themselves, but that’s not a big thing for China, I don’t think so. I think that US Trade War is more important for them.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Sir, do you think China support to North Korea is like a hindrance factor to US as to not achieve the global power?
Dr Tansen Sen: I don’t think even China knows what’s happening in North Korea. So, I think what has happened in the past, China has been really supportive of multi-lateral talks and bringing North Korea into some kind of discussion with other countries because it does not want a nuclear war next to its border. So, it has tried to control Kim Jong Un a number of times but he has his own mind so that the idea that somehow PRC controls North Korea is somehow not right and North Korea has its own way of doing things. It is dependent on PRC in a number of ways but it has its own policies as well.
Lakshmi Karlekar: So, China is facing problems like some solution to population and they are not agreeing to situations like they are not compelling to the orders of ICJ in South China dispute. So, what kind of order is China trying to maintain and what kind of view is China giving to the entire world?
Dr Tansen Sen: Every country has its natural interest. They will do, India has its national interest, right. So, I don’t think it’s surprising that China does things that benefits them. That’s the first thing they have to do. Population is a different issue. Population in China has a huge demographic problem because shortly the labour forces decline, so in order of GDP growth and economic development you have to have a labour force and if you have an ageing population who is going to support them so that’s the reason they had to change the one-child policy. But the demographic problem is quite important and one of the things China does is that it thinks on long term and comes up with different ways to do that. Pollution also I think is a big issue but as you know the most polluted city is Delhi. So, they have taken steps to address to reduce the pollution issue and then this will lead to the use of solar power so as they get rid of coal energy. Shanghai, I can tell you has improved tremendously in the last three years. That has not happened in Delhi or Kolkata. So, they are dealing with it. It will take time. But the problem which China is not these things alone it is that people cannot voice their position to the policies right so they may not like the policies. But that kind of civil society, state dialogue really does not exist. The role of civil society is a major problem and that relates to MeToo, pollution and many other things. I think civil society has an important role in society and if you are trying to block that it is not good in the long term. And it can’t be state driven. Thanks.
Lakshmi Karlekar: Thank you Sir for your time and cooperation.
Dr Tansen Sen: You’re welcome.
Lakshmi Karlekar is a first year MA student in the Department of International Studies and History, CHRIST(Deemed To Be University)
The Global South - yet another monicker for ‘third-world’ countries?
A Talk with Thomas Krippner,
University of Tuebingen, Germany
Lesley Amol Simeon | August, 2019.
In the new-age race to forge newer and perhaps more dominant identities, the concept of the Global South seems to join the bandwagon. Used by academicians, media practitioners and the general public alike, the term has come to serve a motley of constructs - from fostering South-South cooperation, to deepening the North-South divide or to refer to ‘Third World’ or developing countries. While some make mention of the Global South in geographical terms, most vie for the usage of the term more effectively in cultural and political contexts. In a chat with Beyond the Borders, PhD Scholar at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, Thomas Krippner talks on why the term is actually unifying in a sense, why the term is as problematic as it is convenient and how the map, as we know it, is not as apolitical we thought it to be.
American philosopher Thomas Kuhn talks about a visual ‘Gestalt’ - where scientists with different paradigmatic views observe different patterns in the same data. Do you think that holds true for maps as well?
On one side, you think a map is a very apolitical tool. It shows you a reality, no? It’s often said that if you pursue something in a scientific way, you will see the truth. But even scientific research comes from bias. If you are a neutral person, you won't do any research. A map as a geographical tool, is in someone always political. Maybe not intended. For example, you never see the Pacific Ocean as one piece. You never think that the US with its west border and Asia with its east border have a connection and that Alaska was in fact bought from Russia for a few million dollars. There's also an inherent cultural connection here that never comes up. Drawing a map is putting reality in a small simplistic model which will highlight one element over another. When we use maps, we are not referring to plain information, but information arranged in a particular way.
In this context does the term Global South attempt to rearrange global power-play then?
The Global South refocuses the map. The agenda behind the Global South in the academic world is not only to talk about the western countries but also talk about all the other counties that perhaps share a history of colonialism, or economic exploitation or maybe a decade or more of positive things such as extensive growth - basically taking the focus away from ethnocentrism. For me the term Global South helps in breaking away from stereotypes, but at the same time it's also problematic in the sense, I don't even know what is the global south. I mean, are countries like Japan and Korea (sic) part of the Global South? The term Global South is a relational term. Greece as a state went bankrupt and needed investment to be rescued. So in Europe, Greece would've been stigmatised as a Global South country.
Interesting that you make that point about the Global South being a relative term. What then qualifies a country to be a part of the Global South, in the broad sense?
As a researcher, firstly, countries that share a colonial past form the Global South. Another unifying thing is that these countries have extremes - extreme wealth and poverty. India has more millionaires than my country (Germany) but also more poor people. Assessing poverty again is also problematic. As an extension of the binaries which have started in the colonial period, I think this is a heritage that a lot of Global South societies today have. The concept of Global South for me is also a shift from the concept of the nation state. There might be some ethnicities or communities within a nation state which are privileged or underprivileged and disadvantaged in a strong way. Look at the Rohingyas, they are a typical phenomenon of the Global South nations and their history. Because of the nation building dynamics, they are left between borders.
More often than not, developed nations have conveniently shifted the blame or the onus of ensuring a number of things in the world today, to developing nations - tending to concerns of Climate Change is one such example. Do you think shifting the focus from the Global North to the Global South can be used as a tool to further this agenda?
My personal understanding of the Global South is of its deconstructive character. It’s not to say that this country is part of the Global South and this is not. It is also a term of centre and periphery. The blame question is very legitimate. The notion that the west or the Global North has been through the entire cycle of globalisation, gives me the idea that we are finished and advantaged in a way. If you look at environmental hazards, we cannot blame the Global South in our definition and expect them to not got through their own developmental cycle and rescue the environment by cutting down on their industrialisation process. This is for me a very static perspective of solutions. It assumes that only if you cut down on industrialisation, can the world can be saved. But it could be the other way round. For example, India is a huge energy consumer, and a massive energy importer as well. If india could produce its own renewable energy that could resolve a lot of things.
The critique is legitimate, but what isn't is the notion that asks, why shouldn’t we go in the same industrial hazardous development cycle and do things like blasting the sky with carbon dioxide; maybe there are better solutions.
How impactful is the term ‘Global South’ in real-time decision making?
In my personal view, the biggest positive effect of the term Global South is that it unifies. If Asia, as a continent,as a region of different populations and as a potential victim of climate change, were to act not as a modern country, but as a citizen or world region, then it would only add to its potential or global power. ‘The West’ as a concept has a strong political (connotation). One day, if Europe falls apart, the world order and the balance would crumble - more so if the European Union falls apart. In maintaining strong relations within a region, you obviously score political gains. In terms of politics and media, the term Global South can have a positive effect. But, it is debatable for whom it is going to benefit. It always boils down to who of the lot has been disadvantaged and whether we want to focus on community building - in the sense of identifying, fighting, discussing and correlating with others. It brings you in a more interactive and thereby, a powerful position.
Lesley Amol Simeon is the final year Masters Student of International Studies at CHRIST(Deemed To Be University)
In the new-age race to forge newer and perhaps more dominant identities, the concept of the Global South seems to join the bandwagon. Used by academicians, media practitioners and the general public alike, the term has come to serve a motley of constructs - from fostering South-South cooperation, to deepening the North-South divide or to refer to ‘Third World’ or developing countries. While some make mention of the Global South in geographical terms, most vie for the usage of the term more effectively in cultural and political contexts. In a chat with Beyond the Borders, PhD Scholar at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, Thomas Krippner talks on why the term is actually unifying in a sense, why the term is as problematic as it is convenient and how the map, as we know it, is not as apolitical we thought it to be.
American philosopher Thomas Kuhn talks about a visual ‘Gestalt’ - where scientists with different paradigmatic views observe different patterns in the same data. Do you think that holds true for maps as well?
On one side, you think a map is a very apolitical tool. It shows you a reality, no? It’s often said that if you pursue something in a scientific way, you will see the truth. But even scientific research comes from bias. If you are a neutral person, you won't do any research. A map as a geographical tool, is in someone always political. Maybe not intended. For example, you never see the Pacific Ocean as one piece. You never think that the US with its west border and Asia with its east border have a connection and that Alaska was in fact bought from Russia for a few million dollars. There's also an inherent cultural connection here that never comes up. Drawing a map is putting reality in a small simplistic model which will highlight one element over another. When we use maps, we are not referring to plain information, but information arranged in a particular way.
In this context does the term Global South attempt to rearrange global power-play then?
The Global South refocuses the map. The agenda behind the Global South in the academic world is not only to talk about the western countries but also talk about all the other counties that perhaps share a history of colonialism, or economic exploitation or maybe a decade or more of positive things such as extensive growth - basically taking the focus away from ethnocentrism. For me the term Global South helps in breaking away from stereotypes, but at the same time it's also problematic in the sense, I don't even know what is the global south. I mean, are countries like Japan and Korea (sic) part of the Global South? The term Global South is a relational term. Greece as a state went bankrupt and needed investment to be rescued. So in Europe, Greece would've been stigmatised as a Global South country.
Interesting that you make that point about the Global South being a relative term. What then qualifies a country to be a part of the Global South, in the broad sense?
As a researcher, firstly, countries that share a colonial past form the Global South. Another unifying thing is that these countries have extremes - extreme wealth and poverty. India has more millionaires than my country (Germany) but also more poor people. Assessing poverty again is also problematic. As an extension of the binaries which have started in the colonial period, I think this is a heritage that a lot of Global South societies today have. The concept of Global South for me is also a shift from the concept of the nation state. There might be some ethnicities or communities within a nation state which are privileged or underprivileged and disadvantaged in a strong way. Look at the Rohingyas, they are a typical phenomenon of the Global South nations and their history. Because of the nation building dynamics, they are left between borders.
More often than not, developed nations have conveniently shifted the blame or the onus of ensuring a number of things in the world today, to developing nations - tending to concerns of Climate Change is one such example. Do you think shifting the focus from the Global North to the Global South can be used as a tool to further this agenda?
My personal understanding of the Global South is of its deconstructive character. It’s not to say that this country is part of the Global South and this is not. It is also a term of centre and periphery. The blame question is very legitimate. The notion that the west or the Global North has been through the entire cycle of globalisation, gives me the idea that we are finished and advantaged in a way. If you look at environmental hazards, we cannot blame the Global South in our definition and expect them to not got through their own developmental cycle and rescue the environment by cutting down on their industrialisation process. This is for me a very static perspective of solutions. It assumes that only if you cut down on industrialisation, can the world can be saved. But it could be the other way round. For example, India is a huge energy consumer, and a massive energy importer as well. If india could produce its own renewable energy that could resolve a lot of things.
The critique is legitimate, but what isn't is the notion that asks, why shouldn’t we go in the same industrial hazardous development cycle and do things like blasting the sky with carbon dioxide; maybe there are better solutions.
How impactful is the term ‘Global South’ in real-time decision making?
In my personal view, the biggest positive effect of the term Global South is that it unifies. If Asia, as a continent,as a region of different populations and as a potential victim of climate change, were to act not as a modern country, but as a citizen or world region, then it would only add to its potential or global power. ‘The West’ as a concept has a strong political (connotation). One day, if Europe falls apart, the world order and the balance would crumble - more so if the European Union falls apart. In maintaining strong relations within a region, you obviously score political gains. In terms of politics and media, the term Global South can have a positive effect. But, it is debatable for whom it is going to benefit. It always boils down to who of the lot has been disadvantaged and whether we want to focus on community building - in the sense of identifying, fighting, discussing and correlating with others. It brings you in a more interactive and thereby, a powerful position.
Lesley Amol Simeon is the final year Masters Student of International Studies at CHRIST(Deemed To Be University)