Re: India ready to concede Aksai Chin to China?
China has cornered India from all sides by becoming too close with India's neighbors. China already has Nepal, Myanmar under it's control. It has Pakistan as its ally and now working on Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at New Delhi's Centre For Policy Research.
He says that autocratic China is far more robustly focused on strategic advantage than India's sprawling democracy where quick decisions are as rare as consensus.
BRAHMA CHELLANEY: India is therefore always behind China and this is most apparent in both the figures on economic growth rates in India and China with China far ahead of India and also in the level of defence spending.
For a whole decade the Indians put on hold their military modernisation and they've allowed their defence spending to decrease as a percentage of the GDP over the last 17 years, while the Chinese in the same period have sharply accelerated their defence spending because they know that military might is critical to building leverage to advancing economic interests. They have a more comprehensive view both of security and of power, while the Indians are more prone to a self-righteous worldview.
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In Pakistan, China's "all-weather" friend, Wen inaugurated the Chinese-built Gwadar port and naval base, close to Pakistan's border with Iran. Gwadar, one of the world's largest deep-sea ports, will not only arm Pakistan with critical strategic depth against a 1971-style Indian attempt to bottle up its navy, but it will also open the way to the arrival of Chinese submarines in India's backyard, completing India's strategic encirclement by Beijing.**