This post by Ananth Krishnan includes an interview with Vijay Gokhale, a set of excerpts from various recent articles, and thoughts by Krishnan on issues in how China understands India. It’s hard to summarize, so good to read it all. I was struck by this assessment of Chinese writing on its relations with India:
“There’s lots of debate and writing in India on our China policy, what we got wrong, and where it should go. If you’ve read my book, you’ll find lengthy critiques of India’s foreign policy and how it looks at relations with China. Yet increasingly, I find there is no such introspection on the Chinese side. Not one Chinese scholar has made a serious attempt to deal with the source of the rupture in relations. Perhaps it’s because how, unlike 10-15 years ago, discussions of foreign policy have become so straitjacketed. But a conversation can’t go very far if the basic premise is that every problem in the relationship is because of the other side’s insecurities, which is what I increasingly hear and read in Beijing. It wasn’t always this way.”
Paul Staniland 