Abstract
China became India’s neighbour in 1949 and fought a serious war in less than 20 years in 1962. While studying China was always important, it has become a serious passion in India to write about China only in the last decade and a half. As a result, a large number of China-focused publications of all types, print and digital, are coming out on a regular basis. Moreover, one can expect this trend only to rise as the Galwan valley violence of June 2020 breaks the pattern of managed peace on the difficult border. More publications on a difficult neighbour can only be a good thing. However, one must ask how much of the publication is indeed research or how much of it is a collection of perceptions of how things ought to be. It is believed that this simple question ought to bring about a lot of qualitative change in what is being written about China in India.
This book, China Ascendant: Its Rise and Implications, has been edited by Professor Harsh V. Pant, a renowned scholar on Asian security affairs. The book attempts to look at China’s rise from an Indian perspective. It does so by discussing various aspects about China. So far so good; however, this book includes no fewer than 49 chapters in about 340 written pages including endnotes. The editor of the book calls the contributions to this volume essays. However, none of the essays are longer than five pages, making them appear more like summaries or research notes rather than essays in the first place. There is this tendency of publishing research notes or op-eds as collected volumes and their fit as a volume is another issue that may need a closer look too.
Another important issue is about research training on China. To be sure, the host institution has emerged as a principal research and outreach think tank in India, but it is a surprising fact that very few contributions to this volume are actually by the researcher trained in China studies. To state this is not to question their skill or training. However, serious China studies scholarship does exist in India and publications like this point to the policy gap between capacity building and utilisation as far as strategic and foreign policy studies research on the most important neighbour is concerned.
One must ask who is the intended audience of the book? If it is the new reader on China, then he/she might be impressed on the diverse range of issues covered in this book. To that extent, the editor and the contributors must be complimented for their work for introducing so many issue areas. However, it may be a different issue from the perspective of scholarship and value addition. The research notes do little justice to the topics under study. They do little more than scratch the surface. The second problem with this form of work is that it gets repetitive after a point. There are four chapters dedicated to the Belt and Road Initiative and the topic comes up again for discussion in other chapters as well. These chapters could well have been merged for better readability. They do not even give an adequate sense of the Chinese policy thought on this or on multilateralism and such.
Next is the issue with referencing. Most of the chapters do not refer to official Chinese documents, white papers or speeches, or even Chinese scholars writing in English. The SCMP and The Diplomat are the most frequently seen references. Again, there are a few notable exceptions, but this is more of a pattern across the 49 chapters. In this age when the number of Chinese publications in English has risen exponentially, it is no longer an excuse to not look at them.
The section on China’s Economy, Society and Culture includes a lot of chapters which have more to do with India than about China itself. This was an excellent opportunity lost because China’s economy, society and culture and their interplay are something less studied and understood in India. The geographic organisation of the book also leads to a lack of probe on the important domestic and external link in China’s behaviour and self-perception. A large number of significant issues, such as local consumption, welfare, gender, regional inequality, public policy, role of provincial governments, inter-provincial conflict and competition, centre–state debate in China, Made in China 2025, Banking Crisis etc., BRI’s domestic dimension, all of which fall under domestic scenario, are simply not discussed at all. If the point is to understand China, these are the places to look for new policy directions. Similarly, events like National People’s Congress, various plenums and so on have also not been discussed independently.
A volume of this nature could have benefitted a lot with a robust conclusion to bring it all together. Understanding China is not about the events that can be read on in newspapers. It is the processes that matter and any book that aims to make a serious contribution to the field of China studies cannot afford to not explain the processes behind the events.