Review By Harsimran Kaur

Rating: 4/5

I recently read an article by Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary of India, dated March 2022 published in Times of India. The article holds a strong view point on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and how vociferously United States has managed to pull the barrel to make Russia fall weak in its knees. The writer has dappled the insurgent conflict to the pusillanimous mind whose self-justifying exculpation has no pores to seep in the misbegotten debunk. What’s more to offer when the foliage has shrunk in its root and the barren land asks for the benevolence of humanity?

Russia is at war and the geopolitical ambition of China to sip a straw with the United States has got into a black hole. Being a close ally to Russia, China is at the dagger’s edge unable to maneuver the fancy to be the paterfamilias of the discordant empire.

So, how do we see China now?

A faceless miscreant digging its own grave by being a nonchalant supporter to Russia.

Or an infallible jester using chicanery to politically outstrip its opponent, being a Machiavellian irredentist.

And, finally a penchant to be a super power that the world might see as an aberration or a visceral propaganda.

How China sees India and the World is a domain anomaly of ‘Big fish eats the small fish.’

But, what draws China to be somewhat boorish and prone to recriminations is a history laden with idiosyncratic presumptions formed due to skirmishes with the tribals, a pestering need to protect its territory fromimperious sovereignty and a fatigued intolerance to what is prejudiced as ‘barbaric.’

The book ‘How China sees India and the World’ is a cornucopia of a vast historical magnificence and how the latent buds of the past have sprinkled water shoots to define China’s centralized concept of governance.

Familiarity is a concept that’s makes ships cross the tumultuous waves or birds change their course of travel and counties through a familiarized history move from entente to rivalry to cold war.We all are familiar with our roots and the dexterity with which we uphold it leads to a healthy and strong disbursement of our ideological importuning, which could be a bit vexing for others. China holds this mantle to the best of its interest. Its casus belli has been a deleterious scourge by several dynasties that have made and unmade what China is today. The potent insinuation by the tribals and subsequent seismic warfare to decimate the dynastic rule has made China an aggressor to catch the mouse by its tail. In retrospect, this is how a familiarized foreign invasion has helped China to fortify its mind to emasculate territorial threats.

Shyam Saran is an intellectual visionary in his contemplation of Chinese pre-occupation of India and the World. Buddhism in China sprang from the womb of India and many monks travelled to each of the country for enlightenment and spread of knowledge. The trade cords were strongly rootled and the respective cultures were conspicuously appreciated. But, previous decades saw a combustible disparaging of India by its Chinese counterparts.

The presumptions are many and the book is an agglomeration of polemics by Chinese philosophers and aficionados on the ‘slave culture’ of India that’s makes it a wrinkled walnut that does not flare its inclusiveness unless whacked on the ground multiple times—a notion not fractured easily by Chinese condescension.

TAKE AWAY

Last year in July 2021, the CPC (Communist Party of China) completed 100 years of governance. The party was started with Mao and his campaign of ‘Great Leap Forward’ and today Xi Jinping has galloped the horse with a formidable precision. His indigenous fulcrum to restore China’s history of communism and the anomalous political situation has put the country in smoke and shadows. The profligacy of United States can no longer be a thunder crust for China to be irresponsible and carry all the schadenfreude—it’s time to stop the boots from thinning and be a beacon of soft power.

The book proffers history of China and its impact in the most unprecedented way—prodigiously researched and analyzed.