Bhutanese can see the developments and benefits that China brought to neighbouring countries like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Even countries far and away are reaping the rewards of Chinese infrastructure developments, like in Africa. What can India do to uplift the lives of people in neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh? India is not even capable of uplifting its own people out of poverty fast enough. If Bhutan gets stuck with India, it will remain backward and poor.
Years of touting on the population increase in India as providing a 'demographic dividend', is realistically becoming a disaster for India to keep increasing its population without eradicating poverty first. It is said that Indians may be well educated, but jobs creation are not keeping up and being jobless keeps the people poor, one genertion to the next.
And that is not going to improve the lives of its younger generation. It is adding to the problem of creating more jobs for India's expanding population. And India needs manufacturing and investments, to provide more jobs, which will take time. Investors are still wary of investing in India, particularly the Chinese. They prefer to move their factories to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. That is why the Chinese are building high speed rail connections, upgrading ports to provide the facilities to serve those manufacturing hubs.
Kashmir is also administered by three countries - India, Pakistan and China. And Kashmir may be next in line to follow Bhutan.
What the Chinese could do in Bhutan and Kashmir is help to develop the regions under its administration to show the rest of the two countries not under its administration, what they stand to benefit under Chinese administration. That I believe is what the Indians are worried about.
Anonymous
China must rescue Bhutan from the greedy bullying clutches of India . .
ReplyDeleteIndia is following the tactics of the Anglo Saxon Whites. Keep Bhutan and Kashmir poor and it will be easier to control them. And keep neighbours poor as well, so that India can be seen as better off. Just look at Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as examples. And India would certainly not like Pakistan to be better. But China crashed the Indian party, racing so far ahead that the Indians are extremely jealous and vindictive. They refused to joing the BRI and RCEP when given the chance. Well, let us see.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, China's policy is to help neighbours and other countries get rich with infrastructure developments, so that they grow and progress and in the process China can do more trade with them under a win win situation. The BRI was conceived for that purpose, and faced immediate demonisation and condemnation, highlighting its ills, debt traps and trying to sabotage its implementation, using terrorism to create problems particularly across Central Asia.
The USA and the West had used brainwashing techniques to demonise communism as backward and not progressive and can never lift its citizens out of poverty compared to democracy for decades. They created wars to destroy communism, in Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula, and managed to succeed in Europe, with the Soviet Union and East Germany falling apart. Well, today, that has been proven a myth and a lie.
But they were so confident of themselves that they took their eyes off China, thinking that China, like every other communist country, can never overtake them. Now they have seen what is before them and what others have also seen in fueling China's rise. Does the changing world not aware of what is going on? Even the Africans, dubbed the 'Dark Continent' saw the benefits and are now following the right path.
And democracy, the system itself, is breaking up. Many democratic countries are actually now actually more autocratic than democratic in name only.