Jawaharlal Nehru and Mao Zedong at a reception during the Indian prime minister’s 1954 China visit. Photo: Public.Resource.Org  / Flickr
Jawaharlal Nehru and Mao Zedong at a reception during the Indian prime minister’s 1954 China visit. Photo: Public.Resource.Org / Flickr

India’s other China problem

Indian research and scholarship on China suffers from a narrow focus on ‘national interest’.

Indian media's coverage of the country's ongoing tensions with China has been remarkable for the proliferation of voices from the 'strategic community' – a group that includes retired civil servants, diplomats, army officers, as well as international-relations experts, journalists and commentators. Despite such spikes in interest, Chinese politics and society remain understudied in contemporary India, with a visible dearth of experts with facility in the Chinese language and a record of rigorous research.

In this interview, we explore these issues with Arunabh Ghosh, a historian of modern China and the author of the recently published Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. Ghosh talks about the poor state of China scholarship in India, the securitisation of the subject after the 1962 war, the two country's history of scientific exchanges, and how Chinese media covers Southasia.

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