Invade Russia, Iran And North Korea — With Connectivity Connectivity will undermine China’s efforts to backstop these rogue regimes, while also creating a new and more constructive dynamic with all three. ............... Iran, North Korea and Russia are increasingly strategic tiles on the geopolitical chessboard. China has been backing these rogue authoritarian regimes for many years, thwarting American sanctions and rendering Western pressure inert. ........
a new approach: radical connectivity
........ Iran is a populous, young, energy rich nation at the crossroads of Eurasian and oceanic trade routes. ........ Iranian oil exports to China are soaring. Beijing and Tehran also recently inked a 25-year, $40 billion agreement as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. .......... The U.S. pullback from Afghanistan has changed the Gulf states’ calculations. Saudi Arabia and Iran have had several rounds of talks, and last month Saudi Arabia issued visas for three Iranian diplomats to take up posts in the kingdom. Iranian officials have also been on a charm offensive with Abu Dhabi.Russia is moving ahead with plans to convene a regional security conference to bring all the region’s powers — including Israel and Iran — under one tent.
.......... Israel has watched as the same countries it has reconciled with, partially in the name of confronting Iran — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — now reconcile with its mortal enemy. .......... The ordinary Iranians I met viewed their own regime with far greater suspicion than they do the West. ......... Pyongyang — and other relevant Asian capitals, not least Seoul — accept that Kim will not give up nuclear weapons before a formal declaration of the end of the Korean War and the launch of talks toward peaceful reunification. ........As with Iran, the U.S. could turn the tables by agreeing to lift sanctions and push for normalization. This has been the approach that successive governments in Seoul have wished for
.......... Despite having far less access to the world, the North Koreans I met were not brainwashed. ........... The question for the U.S., Japan and allied powers, then, is whether North Korea remains a hostile state, hostage to China and Russia, or whether it can be peacefully reunited with South Korea to produce another important counterweight to China in a region wary of its rise. .......... From poisoning opposition figures to hacking foreign governments and invading neighbors, nothing is off the table for Putin’s Russia — despite years of sanctions that have collapsed the ruble’s value and cost the economy $350 billion of lost economic growth. .......... Russia has been playing its weak hand strongly, converging with China on arms deals, energy trade, and Belt and Road infrastructure projects, while opportunistically poking at the West — for example, by ferrying Arab and Afghan migrants to the Baltic borders. ..........In 2021, Russia was the world’s top wheat exporter.
........... Putin has publicly confessed that the country’s precipitous population decline “haunts” him. ....... In 2021, Siberia’s nearly 200 forest fires were bigger than those in the entire rest of the world combined. ......... is considering inviting more Indian agricultural workers into the country ......... While European governments use visa restrictions as a source of leverage on Russia, they actually need Russian tourists and students to rejuvenate their hospitality and education sectors. ........... China’s grand strategy is as much about advancing its connectivity as modernizing its military. Its checkbook diplomacy thwarts Western soft power at every turn. If the West is serious about not ceding any more ground, it needs to offer real alternatives. As the U.S. girds for a new Cold War with China, its strategy must resemble that era’s: winning countries over through incentives ranging from trade and investment to immigration and education.China puts its money where its mouth is. The West must do the same.
............ The Biden administration’s democracy summit hardly made Iran, Russia and North Korea quiver. ........... China-based Huawei is the frontrunner to construct Iran’s 5G network and is already underway with North Korea’s. ......... As I have observed from my travels in all three countries, Iran, Russia and North Korea are societies with enormous gaps between the regime and the people. Diplomatic openness helps blow that gap apart even further. The West can’t demonstrate its appeal to more than 80 million mostly young Iranians by closing off their access to it — it would be better to give them a choice. In countries where elections don’t matter, the most important right is the opportunity to vote with one’s feet.I Would Rather Be Born A Woman In China Than India The vanity projects and military gadgets that are meant to signal India’s arrival on the global stage are doomed to sputter and die unless the country can improve the abysmal reality of the systematic denial of agency to women. ........... Historically, the experiences of many women in Asia’s two major civilizations, India and China, have been nasty. In China, young girls had their feet broken and bound to give them a shape presumed to be attractive to men. In parts of India, they were burned on the funeral pyres of their husbands in a practice called sati. In both countries, proverbs comparing women unfavorably to various animals, mocking their intelligence and even mourning their existence, remain common. ......... A married daughter is described in Chinese as “spilled water” — useless. ....... In Malayalam, the language of the southern Indian state of Kerala, ostensibly one of India’s most progressive regions, a disappointing state of affairs is compared to “a home where a baby girl has just been born.” ......... The bulk of the over 100 million “missing girls” in the world, identified by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in a widely cited 1990 essay for the New York Review of Books, were in India (37 million) and China (44 million). ........... I was unprepared, imaginatively, for the sheer physicality of women in China that I immediately noticed upon arriving in Beijing in the summer of 2002. Chinese women inhabited public spaces in a way that was impossible in most parts of India. They didn’t walk as though folding themselves inward to be invisible to passing men. They didn’t avoid eye contact. They rang their bicycle bells loudly. Sometimes they loitered. They were often brash, elbowing their way to the front of queues. ................
It was more likely for me to spot a woman taxi or bus driver in Beijing than it had been in London or Los Angeles
........... The residential committee of the neighborhood I lived in was staffed by daunting dames with Chairman Mao coiffures who could bring errant residents in line with a glance. At the airport, men were often frisked, with businesslike indifference, by female security guards. .........the labor force participation of adult females (between 15-64 years of age) is nearly 60% in China, higher than the United States (56%) and triple the abysmal figure of 20% in India.
.......... India still has around 186 million women who are unable to read and write a simple sentence in any language. The contrast with China, where more than 95% of women are literate, is sharp and revealing. ......... About 113 women in 100,000 died due to childbirth-related complications in India for the period 2016-18, compared to 18 per 100,000 in China. .......... The cumulative impact of deep-seated gender biases results in the denial of education and self-realization opportunities for women and, over time, robs them of their self-worth as human beings. There is a huge economic cost to this that compounds the emotional one. ......... if Indian women participated in the labor force at an equal ratio to men, it would boost the country’s GDP by 27%. ..........Investing in and improving outcomes for women is therefore arguably more important for a country’s prospects than building shiny infrastructure or reducing tariff barriers.
............ Until it can improve the lot of Indian women — a change that requires considerable social engineering (for which there is underwhelming appetite), high-speed trains, giant statues and the other showy weapons in the current government’s arsenal that are meant to signal India’s arrival on the global stage will remain damp squibs, doomed to sputter and die before the abysmal reality of the systematic denial of agency to women. .......... Mao also challenged gender norms by radically breaking with the past. That “women hold up half the sky” is a well-known adage of his. Legislation in 1950 gave women the right to divorce for the first time. Mao encouraged women to work outside the home, and age-old practices like foot-binding and concubinage were eradicated. Most significantly, people were educated into a formal belief regarding gender equality for the first time. ...............communism did accelerate the collapse of feudal hierarchies and sharply circumscribed the power of religiously sanctioned misogyny
........... “If, in Haryana, we also made it compulsory to have only one child, what couldn’t the women achieve?” She argued that being freed from the burden of raising several children was empowering. Moreover, if a family could only have one child, all resources would be made available to feeding and educating that child, regardless of gender. .......... some of the misogynistic practices stamped out, or at least sublimated, during the revolutionary years have re-emerged under the country’s new brand of red capitalism. .......... Concubines, in the traditional sense, may have ceased to exist, but the practice of keeping mistresses is back. And female employment rates have been steadily decreasing over the last two decades. This is partly a result of a concerted effort to encourage women to focus on marriage and family instead of careers through the state-assisted dissemination of the idea of “leftover women,” who are unable to find husbands because of their high levels of education and “unrealistic” demands. ............ the myriad ways in which the continuing patriarchal norms underlying inheritance have effectively kept women from benefitting from the trillions of dollars generated by China’s real estate boom. ..........Despite what fashion magazines might have us believe, a woman’s greatest dream is not to walk down the aisle in designer bridal wear, but merely to be able to go out for a walk without fear. Even if it is late at night. Even if it is unaccompanied. And this is a dream more likely realized in China.
@pallaviaiyar I shared in a dozen Messenger groups. https://t.co/Zn9yRvWnDS :) #wellsaidwellput
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 21, 2022
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