-
Tarun Vijay
-
The Chinese are patriotic people. They don't allow any Lalgarhs to emerge with Maoists of some sort championing the cause of the poor by killing security personnel.
They have a portrait of Mao at the Tiananmen square but have reduced his biographies in textbooks to almost a formal mention. It's nationalism everywhere, staunch, undiluted and single-minded "China first".
-
The Chinese hunger to gain more knowledge, more military power, more prosperity and definitely a decisive say in global matters has become one of the most significant stories of our times.
-
President Hu represents a major policy shift in China since Jiang Zemin's regime. He changed the earlier "city first" policy into rural area-focused planning, pumping millions of RNBs into the rural sector.
-
With a shift in the global power centres imminent, China is yet to make up its mind for a new global strategy post-Deng era. Hence it is adopting a hedging strategy without siding clearly with any power centre and keeping its options open.
The only factor that China thinks will help it is a strong urge to remain nationalist. It was quite evident wherever I went in Beijing and around it.
-
Though unlike India, China began opening up and implemented reforms only after having its agriculture and the manufacturing sector strengthened. Then it aimed to quadruple its GNP of 1980 by the end of 2000, which it achieved in 1995, five years ahead of the schedule. Now it has set an objective to double the GNP of 2000 by 2010 and reach the level of a fully developed nation by 2050.
It has controlled the population growth, increased the defence budget to $22.4 billion, has taken the industrial growth to 12.6% , remains as hard as ever on Tibet and other such issues, taken control of Hong Kong and Macao, doesn’t care about Taiwan’s gestures and indications to come back, in fact the biggest investors to China come from that land.
-
China is facing challenges on two major fronts. First, finding a position geopolitically commensurate with its newly gained status on the diplomatic front and cultural and administrative reforms domestically.
On the cultural front China is encountering a vacuum created by the Cultural Revolution. There is no visible cultural inspiration left to the younger generation, which is fast getting Americanised.
-
Civilisational and cultural pride in their national history and heritage has become so visible and underlined at every monument of the historical importance that one wonders whether one is in a land of believers or atheist communists. In this context it would be interesting to know that Buddha, though more in a political and a strategic way, is returning to China in a big way.
-
In the field of administrative reforms, corruption is rampant in the party, in the administration, in the entire state-run machinery.
