While the December 2016 White Paper sheds enough light on China’s growing ambitions in the space sector, it at the same time only reveals what China wants the rest of the world to know.
China has justified the passage of the new law as an ‘objective need’ for national security considering its large cyber infrastructure and its vulnerabilities.
India should seek to ‘redefine’ OROB to add a strong component for a ‘Digital Asia’, as that is where our comparative advantage lies, and for Asian connectivity to have two nodes, in China and in India, as has been the case throughout history.
India must move away from the perspective which it has allowed to dominate, namely, that the application of supercomputers is more important than supercomputer technologies themselves.
Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China in November 2012 and the President of the People’s Republic of China in March 2013. Ever since, under his leadership as the Chinese President, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been progressively tightening its control over the media. In a Communist structure, the media is perceived to be the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Party and is supposed to be used for propaganda. Media is a very essential tool in spreading the government agenda and controlling the public discourse.
China’s push for influence among the Caribbean political elite has been replicated with an equally determined effort to court the military and the bureaucratic elite in the region, often deftly stepping in to take advantage of senseless overreactions on the part of the United States.
Whether the ruling would induce China to adopt a fresh look at the dispute or it would only further complicate the domestic and regional political situations will depend on the domestic, regional and international responses in the coming days and weeks.
The South China Sea is a zone of contention between China and other nations in the region. The US Navy has decreased the number of ships available to counter Chinese encroachments here and this power vacuum may be exploited by the Chinese Maritime Militia (CMM). The militia is comprised of fishing vessels that are used to augment the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and possesses sophisticated communication and GPS technology.
