South Asia India follows China's Central Asian steps

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The geopolitics of Central Asia form one significant template in the surprising twists in China's recent approaches toward India. Chinese policy is adapting to the post-September 11 Central Asian situation with a high degree of flexibility. China is seeking cooperation with India in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. On a pending four-year-old Indian invitation, the chairman of China's autonomous region of Xinjiang, Ismail Tiliwandi, visited India in October. He sought development of transportation links between Xinjiang and India and the laying of a natural-gas pipeline connecting the two countries. Again, China is warming to the idea originally mooted by former Russian prime minister (and the doyen of Soviet "Orientalists"), Yevgeny Primakov, of a strategic triangle involving Russia, China and India.

China has doubtless edged closer to the Russian position on the question of India's membership in an expanded UN Security Council. Last but not the least, China's position that there is no obstacle to the resolution of the border dispute with India is indicative of a willingness to negotiate a settlement that could potentially take relations to an altogether new level.

As India would see it, post-Soviet Central Asia has been accorded a degree of strategic importance in China's regional policy, second only to East Asia and the Taiwan Strait. Chinese diplomacy in Central Asia set out to work, paradoxically, from a position of great strength, but beset with challenges. The Silk Road itself is traceable to the secret mission undertaken by intrepid Chinese traveler Chang Chien in the 2nd century BC to the obscure regions to China's west. It reached the peak of its glory during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) which was also China's "golden age". Under the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when China slammed its door on the West, the Silk Road began to decline - "the traffic slowed, the merchants left", to quote from Peter Hopkirk's masterly chronicle of the Great Game, "and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten" - leaving behind the stuff of so many legends.
Thus, when China "returned" to Central Asia in 1992 in the post-Soviet space, it was the inheritor of a legacy embedded in the region's historical consciousness. But China had challenges to cope with - ill-defined borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; unstable state structures; the specter of religious extremism and militancy haunting the region; economic and social upheaval endemic to periods when an entire era simply gives way; national identities untamed by decades of Soviet rule; and external powers with competing agendas jostling for geopolitical space.

Two distinct phases of Chinese diplomacy are discernible. Up to 1996, China focused largely on giving direction to: (i) establishment of state-to-state relations with the newly independent countries; (ii) settlement of territorial boundaries; (iii) providing legal underpinnings to bilateral relations; (iv) sustaining high-level political exchanges. China, meanwhile, finessed the conceptual framework to move forward. It sought to introduce guiding principles in its discourse with Central Asian capitals - respect for each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity; non-interference in the internal affairs of each other; common cause in strengthening regional stability; and, mutually beneficial cooperation.

Asia Times

[Joy Anne]

1. Asia

There's a great deal going on in Asia, including mutual trade pacts and mutual defense treaties, which the Bush administration (and the U.S. media) has seemingly remained unaware of.

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2. A lot between Asia and S. America too.

I think they just don't want to talk about it.
They don't like the subject nations cutting their own deals,
but can't do diddly about it, and if you make too many
empty threats, nobody listens.