Global Power Shift

The historian Max Hastings described the Second World War as primarily the death grapple between two gargantuan monsters — Adolf Hitler’s Nazi armies against Joseph Stalin’s Soviet forces.

- Aakar Patel

The rest, Winston Churchill's speeches and the American struggle against Japan in the Pacific, was at the most a sideshow and that is true as the nationality of those killed reveals.

The great contest of our time is also between just two powers: Donald Trump’s United States of America and Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China. The rest of the world is a noisy sideshow. The contest between America and China is not military, at least not yet, but the stakes are similar and in many ways higher.

From the outside it can be seen as the struggle for global economic dominance between the West and Asia. Ordinarily we would or should support a fellow Asian power against the West but desis in my experience are both insecure and petty. Let us leave it at that.

What China needs is time. In 1991, when India entered this new phase called liberalisation, we were level with China in economic terms. The average India produced as much as the average Chinese. It is true that China had been reforming for a decade before that, and that is seen as an advantage over us, however it had done so from a position which was much below India’s. In industry and agriculture, it had been shut off from the world for decades, unlike India. And unlike us, the Chinese leadership had put ordinary Chinese through gratuitous suffering out of which the country was just emerging.