Page 1: The front page today is constructed slightly differently. One half of the paper is dedicated to explaining the work that different regions are doing in improving healthcare. At the top is a quote from Xi calling for enabling “the broad masses of the people to enjoy, close to where they live, fair and accessible, systematic and continuous health services, including prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, and health promotion.” 让广大人民群众就近享有公平可及、系统连续的预防、治疗、康复、健康促进等健康服务.

Under this, there are three stories being told. The first is from Shanghai, where the emphasis is on healthcare services for the elderly. “As of the end of 2025, Shanghai had 5,843,800 people aged 60 and above, and there was strong social demand for services that assist older people in accessing medical care and accompany them to medical appointments.” 截至2025年底，上海市60岁及以上老年人口584.38万人，老年人助医陪诊服务的社会需求大. The report talks about a pilot program that has been launched to meet this need.

The second report informs that Jiangsu is building integrated outpatient clinics for chronic diseases. As of 2025, 120 chronic disease screening and prevention centers had been established across the province. The final report talks about the Yunnan government encouraging medical institutions to create flexible outpatient services. In addition, there’s a brief note by editor Ye Qi on the importance of improving healthcare services.

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Moving on, there’s a report on Xi’s congratulatory letter to Ulle Madise on her assumption of office as president of Estonia. Xinhua reports:

“Xi said that China and Estonia enjoy a traditional friendship and that bilateral relations have maintained steady development in recent years, with continued progress in exchanges and cooperation across various fields, bringing benefits to the two peoples. Xi said that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Estonia relations and stands ready to work with President Madise to take the 35th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries this year as an opportunity to enhance political mutual trust, expand mutually beneficial cooperation, deepen people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and continuously enrich the contemporary connotations of bilateral relations.”

Another report talks about Xi and Bob Dadae, governor-general of Papua New Guinea, exchanging congratulations on the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Xinhua says:

“Xi noted that Papua New Guinea is a good friend, good partner and good brother of China in the Pacific island region. Over the past 50 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the two countries have deepened political mutual trust, achieved fruitful results in mutually beneficial cooperation, and expanded people-to-people exchanges, raising bilateral relations to new heights, Xi said. These achievements have benefited the two peoples and injected strong impetus into building a China-Pacific Island countries community with a shared future, said Xi. Noting that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Papua New Guinea relations, Xi said that he stands ready to work with Dadae to take the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations as an opportunity to carry forward traditional friendship, strengthen exchanges and cooperation across various fields, and elevate the comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Papua New Guinea to a new level, so as to deliver greater benefits to the two peoples.”

Next, there’s a report on Li Qiang’s meeting with Tran Thanh Man, chairman of the National Assembly of Vietnam. The report says:

“Li Qiang said that in recent years, under the strategic guidance of CPC General Secretary and President Xi Jinping and CPV General Secretary and President To Lam, the building of the China–Vietnam community with a shared future has continued to deepen and become more substantive. In April this year, the top leaders of the two parties and two countries held a meeting in Beijing, further pointing the way forward for deepening bilateral relations. As ‘comrades plus brothers’, we are willing to work with the Vietnamese side to carry forward our traditional friendship, enhance solidarity and mutual trust, expand mutually beneficial cooperation, better benefit the people of both countries, and inject positive energy into promoting stability and prosperity in the region and the world at large.” 李强表示，近年来，在习近平总书记、国家主席同苏林总书记、国家主席战略引领下，中越命运共同体建设持续走深走实。今年4月，两党两国最高领导人在北京举行会晤，为深化双边关系进一步指明方向。作为“同志加兄弟”，我们愿同越方一道赓续传统友谊，增进团结互信，拓展互利合作，更好造福两国人民，也为促进地区乃至世界稳定繁荣注入正能量.

“Li Qiang pointed out that China is willing to strengthen the alignment of development strategies with Vietnam, make better use of mechanisms such as the bilateral Cooperation Steering Committee, expand and improve the quality of the economic and trade cooperation between the two countries, and continuously improve the quality and efficiency of cooperation in connectivity, artificial intelligence, clean energy, the digital economy and other fields. The two sides should continue to organise activities such as the ‘China–Vietnam Year of Tourism Cooperation’, deepen people-to-people and cultural exchanges and cooperation in medicine, education, youth affairs and other areas, and consolidate the popular foundation of friendship between the two countries. In the face of an international situation marked by intertwined changes and turmoil, China is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with Vietnam within multilateral frameworks such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), China–ASEAN cooperation and Lancang–Mekong cooperation, jointly address risks and challenges, and safeguard the common interests of the two countries and the region. He expressed the hope that the legislative bodies of the two countries would strongly support practical cooperation between the two sides and play a greater role in providing the safeguards of the rule of law and promoting mutual understanding and affinity between their peoples.” 李强指出，中方愿同越方加强发展战略对接，更好发挥双边合作指导委员会等机制作用，做大做优两国经贸蛋糕，推动互联互通、人工智能、清洁能源、数字经济等领域合作不断提质增效。双方要继续办好“中越旅游合作年”等活动，深化医药、教育、青年等人文交流合作，夯实两国友好民意基础。面对国际局势变乱交织，中方愿同越方加强在亚太经合组织、中国—东盟、澜湄合作等多边框架下的沟通协作，携手应对风险挑战，维护两国和地区共同利益。希望两国立法机构大力支持双方务实合作，在提供法治保障、促进民心相通等方面发挥更大作用.

Xinhua adds: “Tran Thanh Man said Vietnam extends its heartfelt congratulations on China’s new and significant achievements in economic and social development, with its economic growth rate ranking among the top of the world’s major economies and its breakthroughs in scientific and technological innovation leading the world. Vietnam has always regarded China as a top priority and a strategic choice in its foreign relations, firmly adheres to the one-China policy, and will maintain close exchanges with China at all levels in accordance with the important consensus reached by the top leaders of the two parties and two countries, Tran Thanh Man added. The National Assembly of Vietnam attaches great importance to and highly recognizes Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, and is willing to enhance exchanges of experience in governance with China, he noted.”

It’s really interesting that foreign leaders are acknowledging Xi’s ideology in specific domains.

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Tran Thanh Man also met Zhao Leji. Xinhua’s report on this says that the two men co-chaired the second session of the joint committee between the legislative bodies in Beijing.

“Zhao, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), said China is ready to work with Vietnam to follow the strategic guidance of the top leaders of the two parties and two countries, and push for deeper and more substantive progress in building the China-Vietnam community with a shared future. He called on the two sides to consolidate strategic mutual trust, maintain the sound momentum of high-level exchanges, and firmly support each other. Zhao said both sides should deepen practical cooperation, advance infrastructure connectivity, expand cooperation in emerging areas such as artificial intelligence, the digital economy, clean energy and communications satellites, cement public support, and deepen exchanges in culture, education and sports. He also called for close coordination on multilateral affairs and joint implementation of the four global initiatives. The NPC of China stands ready to work with the National Assembly of Vietnam to further enhance cooperation by focusing on implementing the important common understandings reached between the top leaders of the two parties and two countries and performing the functions and duties of legislative bodies, Zhao said. He said both sides should establish and make good use of the regular exchange mechanism and share experience in legislation and oversight, urge the implementation of legal documents on mutually beneficial cooperation and foster a more fair, transparent and predictable business environment, and facilitate exchanges between localities, businesses and the people.”

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Finally, there’s a report on Wang Huning’s remarks at the conference marking the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC). The report says:

“Wang Huning stated that work concerning overseas Chinese is a long-term and strategic undertaking of the Party and the state. General Secretary Xi Jinping attaches great importance to doing a good job of work concerning returned overseas Chinese and their family members, as well as overseas Chinese compatriots. He has made important expositions and issued important instructions on overseas Chinese affairs in the new era and on the new journey, profoundly answering a series of directional, fundamental and strategic questions concerning the development of overseas Chinese affairs and promoting solutions to them. We must thoroughly study and understand, and comprehensively implement, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important requirements, and firmly grasp the direction and tasks of work concerning overseas Chinese affairs.” 王沪宁表示，侨务工作是党和国家一项长期性战略性的工作。习近平总书记高度重视做好归侨侨眷和海外侨胞的工作，对新时代新征程侨务工作作出重要论述和重要指示，深刻回答并推动解决一系列事关侨务工作发展的方向性、根本性、战略性问题。我们要深入学习领会、全面贯彻落实习近平总书记重要要求，牢牢把握侨务工作的方向和任务.

“Wang Huning stated that ACFROC is a people’s organisation under the leadership of the CPC and serves as a bridge and link between the Party and the government and the broad masses of returned overseas Chinese, their family members, and overseas Chinese compatriots. Over the past 70 years, ACFROC has remained deeply committed to caring for overseas Chinese, faithfully fulfilling its responsibilities towards them, and doing a good job of providing services that benefit them. It has united and guided the broad masses of overseas Chinese compatriots in playing a unique role in advancing the undertakings of the Party and the state. Since the 18th Party Congress, ACFROC has adhered to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, implemented General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important expositions on overseas Chinese affairs and the decisions and arrangements of the CPC Central Committee, upheld the theme of rallying hearts and strength to realise and share the Chinese Dream together, and adhered to the principle of integrating service to the overall interests with service to overseas Chinese. It has united and mobilised the broad masses of overseas Chinese compatriots to make positive contributions to promoting the country’s economic and social development, advancing the reunification of the motherland, carrying forward and promoting Chinese culture, and enhancing exchanges and cooperation between China and foreign countries.” 王沪宁表示，中国侨联是中国共产党领导的人民团体，是党和政府联系广大归侨侨眷和海外侨胞的桥梁和纽带。70年来，中国侨联坚持深怀爱侨之心、恪守为侨之责、办好利侨之事，团结引导广大侨胞为党和国家事业发展发挥了独特作用。党的十八大以来，中国侨联坚持以习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想为指导，贯彻落实习近平总书记关于侨务工作的重要论述和党中央决策部署，坚持凝心聚力同圆共享中国梦的主题，坚持为大局服务和为侨服务相统一，团结动员广大侨胞在推动国家经济社会发展、促进祖国统一、传承弘扬中华文化、增进中外交流合作等方面作出了积极贡献.

“Wang Huning said that the 15th FYP period is a critical period for basically realising socialist modernisation, and that work concerning overseas Chinese affairs faces a new situation and new tasks. He expressed the hope that ACFROC will bear in mind four requirements: to carry forward its fine traditions, so that the ‘overseas Chinese spirit’ is passed down from generation to generation among overseas Chinese; to deepen love for family and country, guiding overseas Chinese to forge a strong Chinese heart and Chinese soul; to give play to its unique strengths, so that overseas Chinese affairs work better serves the overall situation of national development; to accomplish more, uniting and guiding overseas Chinese to contribute to building a modern socialist country in all respects and advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts. It is necessary to uphold the Party’s overall leadership over the work of the federations of returned overseas Chinese, fully implement the Party’s policies on overseas Chinese affairs, and promote the high-quality development of the cause of the federations of returned overseas Chinese. Party committees and governments at all levels should support organisations of the federations of returned overseas Chinese in carrying out their work in accordance with the law and their constitutions, and provide strong guarantees for these organisations to fulfil their various functions.” 王沪宁表示，“十五五”时期是基本实现社会主义现代化的关键时期，侨务工作面临新的形势和任务。希望中国侨联牢记秉承优良传统的要求，让“侨精神”在广大侨胞中代代相传；牢记厚植家国情怀的要求，引导广大侨胞铸牢中国心中华魂；牢记发挥独特优势的要求，推动侨务工作更好服务国家发展大局；牢记展现更大作为的要求，团结引导广大侨胞为全面建设社会主义现代化国家、全面推进中华民族伟大复兴贡献力量。要坚持党对侨联工作的全面领导，全面贯彻落实党的侨务政策，推动侨联事业高质量发展。各级党委和政府要支持侨联组织依照法律和章程开展工作，为侨联组织履行各项工作职能提供有力保障.

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Page 2: There’s a report on Li Qiang’s call with New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Xinhua reports:

“China-New Zealand relations have maintained steady and sound momentum, with new progress made in cooperation across various fields, Li said. Meanwhile, the international situation remains complex and evolving, with unilateralism and protectionism continuing to weigh on the global economy, he said, adding that calls from the international community to safeguard the multilateral system and strengthen openness and cooperation are growing louder. As supporters and practitioners of multilateralism and free trade, China and New Zealand should strengthen communication and coordination, Li said. Noting that the two countries will mark the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations next year, Li said China stands ready to work with New Zealand to carry forward their traditional friendship, expand mutually beneficial cooperation and deepen their comprehensive strategic partnership, injecting fresh impetus into the stability, development and prosperity in both countries, the region and the world. Li said China is willing to work with New Zealand to remain partners that respect each other and pursue mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. He called on both sides to continue to expand the scale and improve the quality of bilateral trade in goods, tap the potential of trade in services, and expand cooperation in areas such as new energy vehicles, photovoltaics and wind power to deliver more tangible results. The premier expressed hope that the two sides will accelerate negotiations on a negative list for trade in services under the China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement and achieve substantive progress at an early date. The two countries should facilitate people-to-people exchanges and deepen exchanges and cooperation in culture, tourism, education, young people and sub-national entities to strengthen the foundation of friendship between their peoples, Li said. As members of the Asia-Pacific family, China and New Zealand should also strengthen cooperation within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) framework and actively advance the building of an Asia-Pacific community, he added.”

One key outcome: “Luxon also expressed New Zealand’s support for China’s hosting of the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting.”

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Another report on the page informs that in September, China’s automobile exports reached 1.053 million vehicles, up 4.2% month on month and 61.4% year on year. Of these, exports of NEVs reached 571,000, up 1.6 times year on year. NEVs accounted for more than half of total automobile exports for the fourth consecutive month.

In the first nine months of the year, automobile exports reached 8.205 million vehicles, up 65.8% year on year. In the first nine months of the year, NEV production and sales reached 12.483 million and 12.472 million vehicles, respectively, representing year-on-year increases of 11% and 11.1%. NEVs accounted for 53.6% of total sales of new vehicles.

At the same time, although it is published later in the paper, a statement jointly issued by the Ministry of Finance and the State Taxation Administration on Monday announced that the VAT export rebate rate for NEVs will be cut from 13% to 9%, starting April 1, 2027. In addition, VAT export rebates for e-cigarette devices and related products will be scrapped from the same date. Earlier, VAT export rebates for photovoltaic products were scrapped from April 1, 2026, while the rebate rate for battery products had been cut to 6% from 9% on the same date. The rebates for battery products will be eliminated from January 1, 2027.

Finally, there’s a report on the publication of the new Report on the Development of Generative Artificial Intelligence Applications (2026) 生成式人工智能应用发展报告 (2026). This informs that the number of users of generative artificial intelligence in China had exceeded 700 million, with a penetration rate of over 50%.

“Some 76.0% of users said they used generative artificial intelligence to answer questions. The proportions of users who used generative artificial intelligence to process images and videos, handle text, and prepare work summaries, meeting minutes and PowerPoint presentations were 47.8%, 37.6% and 32.5%, respectively. The number of uses of applications such as comprehensive AI assistants and AI-powered office productivity tools increased by more than 100% year on year.” 76.0%的用户表示自己会让生成式人工智能回答问题；使用生成式人工智能处理图片/视频、文本、工作总结/会议纪要/PPT的用户占比分别为47.8%、37.6%和32.5%。人工智能综合助手、人工智能效率办公等应用的使用次数同比增长均超100%.

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Page 3: There’s a report on Wang Yi’s meeting with Nikolai Patrushev in Beijing. The readout says:

“Wang Yi conveyed President Xi Jinping’s cordial greetings to President Putin. Wang Yi stated that President Xi Jinping and President Putin maintain close communication, guiding relations between the two countries towards higher quality and a higher level. Under the piloting and steering of the two heads of state, China and Russia have consistently kept their sights fixed on the long-term undertaking of national rejuvenation and, standing at the historical height of safeguarding international fairness and justice, have unswervingly developed bilateral relations. The two countries’ strategic mutual trust has become firmer, cooperation in various fields has become more resilient, and multilateral coordination has become closer. Last month, elections for Russia’s new State Duma were successfully held. The election results fully reflected the common will of the Russian people, and the Chinese side expressed its congratulations.”

王毅转达习近平主席对普京总统的亲切问候。王毅表示，习近平主席和普京总统保持密切沟通，引领两国关系向更高质量、更高水平迈进。在两国元首领航掌舵下，中俄始终锚定民族振兴的长远事业，站在维护国际公平正义的历史高度，坚定不移发展双边关系。两国战略互信更为牢固，各领域合作更具韧性，多边协调更加紧密。上个月，俄罗斯新一届国家杜马选举成功举行，选举结果充分体现了俄罗斯人民的共同意愿，中方表示祝贺.

“Wang Yi said that the world today is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century. The ocean is a blue bond connecting the world, and it bears on the security and long-term development of all countries. China and Russia are both permanent members of the UN Security Council and major maritime countries. Both shoulder important responsibilities in international maritime affairs, and the prospects for their cooperation are broad. China’s building of the ‘Polar Silk Road’ and Russia’s development of the Arctic shipping routes coincide with each other. Maritime cooperation is becoming ever more important within the China–Russia comprehensive strategic coordination. China is ready to work with Russia to strengthen the alignment of the two countries’ maritime strategies, draw on each other’s complementary strengths, safeguard each other’s legitimate maritime rights and interests, uphold maritime security in the Asia-Pacific region, and keep key global shipping lanes open to normal passage. The sovereignty and security of coastal states must be respected, and the stable supply of energy and resources and the secure operation of industrial and supply chains must be ensured. The two sides should expand their exchanges on maritime and Arctic affairs, start up the ‘blue engine’ of China–Russia relations, contribute China–Russia strength to improving global ocean governance, and promote the building of a maritime community with a shared future.”

王毅说，当今世界处于百年未有之大变局。海洋是联通世界的蓝色纽带，事关世界各国安全和长远发展。中俄同为联合国安理会常任理事国和海洋大国，在国际海洋事务方面都肩负重要职责，具有广阔合作前景。中方建设“冰上丝绸之路”与俄方推进北极航道建设不谋而合，海洋事务合作在中俄全面战略协作中的重要性不断提升。中方愿同俄方一道，加强两国海洋战略对接，实现优势互补，维护彼此正当海洋权益，维护亚太地区海上安全，维护全球关键航道正常通行。要尊重沿岸国主权与安全，保障能源资源稳定供应和产供链安全运行；拓展双方涉海和北极事务交流，发动中俄关系发展的“蓝色引擎”，为完善全球海洋治理贡献中俄力量，推动构建海洋命运共同体.

The readout adds:

“Patrushev conveyed President Putin’s sincere greetings to President Xi Jinping. Patrushev said that close exchanges between the two heads of state are the best guarantee that bilateral relations stay dynamic, pragmatic and enterprising, and oriented towards the future. In the current turbulent and unsettled international situation, the Russia–China comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era is more important than ever before. Russia and China each have unique experience and strengths in the maritime domain. Russia is ready to strengthen cooperation with China in building the ‘Trans-Arctic International Transport Corridor’, in multilateral ocean governance and in other fields. It also wants to draw on China’s useful experience in shipbuilding, logistics, maritime trade and other fields. Russia will work hand in hand with China to promote the building of a maritime community with a shared future and add a new dimension to Russia–China comprehensive strategic coordination. The two sides also had an in-depth exchange of views on international and regional issues of common concern.” 帕特鲁舍夫转达普京总统对习近平主席的诚挚问候。帕特鲁舍夫表示，两国元首保持密切交往是双方关系充满活力、务实进取、面向未来的最好保障。在当前动荡不安的国际形势下，俄中新时代全面战略协作伙伴关系比以往任何时候都更加重要。俄中在海洋领域拥有各自独特经验和优势，俄方愿在“跨北极国际运输走廊”建设、海洋多边治理等领域加强同中方合作，借鉴中方在船舶制造、物流、海上贸易等领域有益经验，与中方携手推动构建海洋命运共同体，为俄中全面战略协作增添新的维度。双方还就共同关心的国际和地区问题深入交换意见.

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Next, there’s a report on He Lifeng’s meeting with Tim Cook. Xinhua says:

“During their meeting, He said implementing the common understandings between the two heads of state and building a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of respect, fairness and reciprocity are conducive to the stability and development of the economies of both countries and the world, and will provide stable expectations and a sound business environment for multinational companies. China welcomes science and technology companies from all countries, including Apple, to continue deepening mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation with China and to share the opportunities of Chinese modernization, He said. Cook said Apple is fully confident in its long-term development in China and will serve as a bridge of communication within the business community, contributing more to promoting the stable and sound development of U.S.-China economic and trade relations.”

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Page 8: There is an article by Gu Yekai on China’s innovation clusters. Gu writes that WIPO recently released its list of the world’s top 100 innovation clusters for 2026, with China accounting for 25 clusters on the list, ranking first in the world for the fourth consecutive year. Three Chinese clusters are in the top 10. For this achievement, Gu credits the “in-depth implementation of the regional coordinated development strategy in the field of scientific and technological innovation.”

“Innovation clusters reflect the close links among research, businesses, talent and investment. In recent years, the commercialisation of scientific and technological achievements in China has accelerated significantly, and new-quality productive forces have continued to develop and grow. Many of the innovation clusters featured in the rankings are also major industrial hubs. Wuhan, ranked 17th, recorded a 65.7% increase in the value added of its high-tech manufacturing industries above the designated size in the first half of this year, while its optoelectronic information industry has accelerated its development. Ningde rose sharply by 24 places in the rankings, closely related to innovation in its power battery industry. A virtuous cycle between innovation and development has enabled a growing number of emerging and future industries to seize the momentum and accelerate their development within innovation clusters.” 创新集群能够反映研究、企业、人才、投资间的紧密联系。近年来，我国科技成果转化速率明显加快，新质生产力培育壮大，上榜的很多创新集群同时也是产业高地。排名第十七位的武汉，今年上半年规上高技术制造业增加值增长了65.7%，光电子信息产业加速发展；宁德排名大幅跃升24个位次，就与动力电池产业创新密切相关。创新与发展之间良好的正向循环，使得越来越多的新兴产业和未来产业在创新集群内乘势而上、加快发展.

“An increasing number of foreign-funded enterprises are choosing to carry out R&D in China and pursue innovation in China, with many of their R&D centres located in these innovation clusters. In the first seven months of this year, foreign applicants filed more than 42,000 invention patent applications in China. In 2025, foreign investment actually utilised in scientific research and technical services accounted for nearly one-fifth of China’s total actually utilised foreign investment. With an open and cooperative approach, China is promoting the sharing of innovation outcomes. In the first half of this year, a total of 81 licensing deals for innovative drugs were concluded with foreign partners, while industrial robots were sold to 141 countries and regions. As Carsten Fink, Chief Economist of the World Intellectual Property Organization, observed, Chinese innovation is increasingly advancing the frontiers of global science and technology across a growing number of fields, and countries around the world are benefiting more and more from innovation in China.” 越来越多外资企业选择研发在中国、创新在中国，其中不少研发中心就位于这些创新集群。今年前7个月，国外申请人在中国申请了超过4.2万件发明专利；2025年，我国科学研究和技术服务领域实际使用外资占我国实际使用外资总额近1/5。中国以开放合作的姿态，推动创新成果共享。上半年，我国创新药对外授权共达成81笔合作，工业机器人销往141个国家和地区。正如世界知识产权组织首席经济学家卡斯滕·芬克所言，中国创新正在越来越多的领域推动全球科技前沿不断拓展，世界各国也越来越多地从中国创新中受益.

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This newsletter is curated by Anwesha Sen.

As governments look to deploy AI in their workflows, the concerns around vendor lock-in and portability that have always existed with software procurement become even more important. MeitY’s guidelines for procurement of cloud services, for example, cover migration of software, standard formats, and government ownership of data generated through use of the system. AI deployments expand what governments must examine to enable interoperability and portability. The procurement question should consider if the government can replace the AI components while preserving the records and context, while meeting the service’s performance and accountability requirements needed to continue the service.

Imagine a municipal government introduces an AI agent for public grievances. A resident reports a broken streetlight in their preferred language. The agent identifies the location, checks whether a complaint already exists, creates a maintenance request and sends an acknowledgement. Later, it retrieves the contractor’s update and asks an authorised officer to approve closing the complaint.

The government may want to change its technology vendor for a host of reasons at some point in the future. The replacement system might understand the resident’s language perfectly and have access to data on all complaints and their status. However, with an AI service, exporting just the database may leave behind information that the system relies on: summaries of previous interactions, instructions revised and approved by staff, unfinished tasks and context retained inside the previous vendor’s AI platform.

Unpacking AI deployment

The distinction between the model, harness and state in an AI deployment becomes useful here. The model supplies capabilities such as interpreting language, summarising information and proposing actions. The harness is the surrounding software that puts these capabilities to work. It assembles the information supplied to the model, connects it to tools, coordinates successive steps, manages memory and implements controls on execution. State is the information that captures the system’s current situation and carries context forward.

Mozilla’s State of Open Source AI maps the surrounding infrastructure into several functional layers. Control coordinates the sequence of work. Reach connects the system to tools, information and memory. Action covers execution, permissions and monitoring. Surface provides the interfaces used by residents and officials. Govern applies policies across systems, while Adapt covers optional training or fine-tuning of the model.

In the grievance example, the model might propose creating a maintenance request. The harness and connected systems must check permissions, submit the request, handle the response and record the resulting ticket number. The state includes completed actions, pending approvals, previous exchanges and relevant institutional knowledge. Some state details already belong in conventional databases and workflow systems, and others may be held in the harness.

This extends the requirements compared with ordinary software procurement. Workflow automation platforms already retain process state, and conventional migrations already require extensive testing. AI makes it easier for useful context to accumulate outside the systems that institutions traditionally recognise as their records. It also introduces a component whose behaviour can change when the model changes, even if its interfaces remain compatible.

Government procurement should extend its existing safeguards against software lock-in to the harness and state of AI systems. Takshashila’s AI diffusion paper provides a starting point for some policy recommendations.

• Open-weight models can widen the choice of suppliers and lower costs. But open weights alone do not make the surrounding service portable: workflows, tool integrations and institutional context may remain tied to one platform. Procurement should therefore preserve the ability to change both the model provider and the harness, whether the chosen model is open or proprietary. Having open as a default for both harness and model can have positive spillovers for other users.

• The government should also reduce the cost of exercising this choice. The paper’s proposed shared procurement platform for inference from multiple approved providers could support competition.

• Procurement should make portability demonstrable. Acceptance testing should include a migration exercise, followed by checks that the replacement handles cases reliably. A database export alone is insufficient.

• Common interfaces and reusable evaluation methods would help departments compare alternatives. Institutions would still need staff and budgets to maintain integrations, oversee records and validate changes.

The procurement objective should be practical independence: an institution must be able to change its AI supplier while preserving its records, responsibilities and continuity of service.

AI Disclosure: ChatGPT was used for brainstorming some of the ideas, copyediting and creating the graphic.

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The politics of the current age are of technology, for technology, and increasingly, by technology. Technology is at the centre of national power, economic growth, and societal change. This raises important questions for all of us:

• What will it take to strengthen India’s own research and development ecosystem?

• How can we build technology responsibly and anticipate its unintended consequences?

• Why are technology and national power increasingly part of the same conversation?

The Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Tech and Policy) programme is designed to help participants answer these questions. Participants will gain the skills and frameworks to create technology responsibly, advancing the public interest alongside business interests.

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And before you go-

Check out Grammar of War, a newsletter by Adya Madhavan, that looks at advanced military technologies!

Page 1: The front page today carries a long Ren Ping article, which recounts two stories from the Long March. The first is the story of half a quilt. In this tale, a woman named Xu Jiexiu offered shelter to three CPC female soldiers during the Long March. When they left the next day, they cut up half of their quilt and gave it to her. Xu would eventually proclaim: “What are the Communist Party (of China) members? They are the ones that even if they have only one quilt, they would offer half of it to the people”.

The article tells us that Xi has referenced this story on a couple of occasions. It then adds:

“This year marks the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in the Long March. Revisiting the story of “Half a Quilt” allows us to deeply appreciate the political character of the people’s army under the Party’s leadership and the fish-and-water bond between the military and the people. Sharing weal and woe with the people, being connected by flesh and blood, and sharing life and death with them was the fundamental guarantee of the victory of the Communist Party of China and the Red Army in the Long March, and is also the fundamental guarantee of our overcoming all difficulties and risks on the road of the new Long March. That the Long March could achieve final victory was, first of all, a victory of ideals and convictions.” 今年是中国工农红军长征胜利90周年。重温“半条被子”的故事，深刻感悟到党领导下的人民军队的政治本色和军民鱼水情。同人民风雨同舟、血脉相通、生死与共，是中国共产党和红军取得长征胜利的根本保证，也是我们在新长征路上战胜一切困难和风险的根本保证。长征能够取得最终胜利，首先是一场理想信念的胜利.

The article adds:

“What is the power of faith? During the Long March, in the vast, desolate grasslands of northwestern Sichuan, the Red Army suffered from a severe shortage of food. Its soldiers dug up wild vegetables, chewed grass roots and gnawed tree bark. Later, they even boiled and ate their leather belts and the soles of their leather shoes. Zhou Guangcai, a Red Army soldier, distributed captured leather belts among his fellow soldiers to stave off hunger. When half the belt had been eaten, Zhou Guangcai wept and pleaded with his comrades: ‘I won’t eat any more! Comrades, let us keep it as a memento. Let us take it with us to Yan’an to see Chairman Mao!’ This half-belt was later donated by Zhou Guangcai and is held in the collection of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution (today the National Museum of China).

In January 2016, when President Xi Jinping inspected the military history museum of a certain group army, he heard the story of ‘Half a Leather Belt’ and remarked with deep emotion: ‘This is the power of faith; it is a vivid illustration of “resolutely following the Party”.’ The new journey is a new Long March. On the road of the new Long March, drawing on the boundless strength embodied in ‘Half a Quilt’ and ‘Half a Leather Belt’—the strength of keeping the Party in one’s heart, keeping ideals in one’s heart, and keeping the people in one’s heart—enables us to understand more deeply the light of truth contained in the General Secretary’s important speech: ‘Along the road ahead, no matter how the situation changes or how complex the environment becomes, all Party comrades must remain steadfast in their faith in communism, their conviction in socialism with Chinese characteristics, and their confidence in realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’.” 什么是信仰的力量？长征途中，川西北苍茫草地，红军严重缺粮，挖野菜、嚼草根、啃树皮，后来连皮带、皮鞋底也煮着吃了。红军战士周广才把缴获的皮带分给战士充饥。当皮带吃了一半时，周广才哭着恳求战友：“我不吃了！同志们，我们把它留作纪念吧，带着它去延安见毛主席！”这半截皮带后被周广才捐赠出来，由中国革命博物馆（今中国国家博物馆）收藏。2016年1月，习近平主席视察某集团军军史馆时，听到“半截皮带”的故事，深有感触地说：“这就是信仰的力量，就是‘铁心跟党走’的生动写照。”新征程是新的长征。新长征路上，汲取“半条被子”和“半截皮带”蕴含的心中有党、心中有理想、心中有人民的无穷力量，更能深刻领悟总书记重要讲话中蕴含的真理之光——“前进道路上，无论形势如何变化、环境多么复杂，全党同志都要坚定对共产主义的信仰、对中国特色社会主义的信念、对实现中华民族伟大复兴的信心”.

The second section of the article adds:

“With the Party in one’s heart, one’s mind is clear and one’s direction is firm. ‘At all times and under all circumstances, we must uphold the Party’s banner as our banner, the Party’s direction as our direction, and the Party’s will as our will.’ General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important assertion is a practical requirement for all Party comrades. It is also a profound conclusion drawn from history. The Long March was beset by a thousand hardships and ten thousand dangers; the hardest, however, was the question of direction. The Zunyi Conference was a great turning point. From then on, the Chinese revolution, under the guidance of the correct line represented by Comrade Mao Zedong, embarked on the road of victorious development. ‘On the long revolutionary road, battered by storms and beset by hardships, the sentence our army’s officers and soldiers spoke most often was: “as long as we follow the Party, we will surely win”.’ For a Party as big as ours and a country as big as ours, upholding the authority of the Party Central Committee ‘is a matter of Party spirit, a matter of the overall situation, and bears on the future and destiny of the Party, the nation and the country.’ Only by being good at viewing problems from a political height can one comprehend the Party Central Committee’s major principles, policies, decisions and plans more thoroughly, and work with greater foresight and initiative.”

心中有党，头脑清、方向明。“任何时候任何情况下都要坚持以党的旗帜为旗帜、以党的方向为方向、以党的意志为意志”。习近平总书记的重要论断，是对全党同志的实践要求，更是从历史中得出的深刻结论。长征千难万险，最难的是方向问题。遵义会议，伟大转折。从此，中国革命就在以毛泽东同志为代表的正确路线指引下，走上胜利发展的道路。“在风雨如磐的漫长革命道路上，我军将士讲得最多的一句话是：只要跟党走，一定能胜利。”我们这么大一个党、这么大一个国家，维护党中央权威，“是党性，是大局，关系党、民族、国家前途命运”。善于从政治高度看问题，对党中央的大政方针和决策部署才能领会更透彻，工作起来才能更有预见性和主动性.

For examples of this, the piece talks about the establishment of the Xiong’an New Area. We are told that “During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the branches of more than 400 centrally administered state-owned enterprises and more than 4,000 enterprises originating in Beijing established themselves in Xiong’an…”

And then this:

“During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the General Secretary successively presided over 10 symposiums on regional development. ‘We must resolutely respond to what the Party Central Committee advocates, resolutely carry out what the Party Central Committee decides, and resolutely refrain from doing what the Party Central Committee prohibits; constantly check against the benchmarks and the timetable, and promptly correct deviations.’ In the Yangtze River Economic Belt, nearly 10,000 chemical enterprises along the river have been ‘shut down, transformed, relocated or converted’, and a river of clear water has reappeared; In the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, ‘Macao vehicles heading north’, ‘Hong Kong vehicles heading north’ and ‘Guangdong vehicles heading south’ are shaping the Bay Area’s ‘centripetal force’… East and west helping each other, north and south in coordination, land and sea planned as a whole, localities are forming a harmonious chorus within the ensemble conducted under the unified command of the Party Central Committee.

On the Long March of the new era, how many great battles and great tests there have been! The whole country, from top to bottom, has acted within the overall situation led by the Party Central Committee, overcoming one difficult pass after another and creating one miracle after another. From this, we comprehend ever more deeply the decisive significance of the ‘Two Establishments’. Striding forward on the new Long March, in examining the view of performance and achievement, what is very important is to see whether the major decisions and plans of the Party Central Committee have been resolutely and forcefully implemented; what is most fundamental is to take the Party’s original aspiration as one’s own aspiration and the Party’s mission as one’s life, truly loving the Party, always being concerned for the Party, firmly protecting the Party, and fully revitalising the Party.

“十四五”时期，总书记先后主持召开10场区域发展座谈会。“做到党中央提倡的坚决响应，党中央决定的坚决照办，党中央禁止的坚决不做，时常对标对表，及时校正偏差”。长江经济带，近万家沿江化工企业“关改搬转”，一江碧水重现；粤港澳大湾区，澳车北上、港车北上、粤车南下塑造湾区“向心力”……东西互济、南北协同、陆海统筹，各地在党中央统一指挥的合奏中形成和声. 新时代的长征路上，多少大战大考！全国上下在党中央统领的大局下行动，攻克了一个又一个难关，创造了一个又一个奇迹。从中，我们更加深刻领悟“两个确立”的决定性意义。阔步新长征，检视政绩观，很重要的就是看是否坚决有力地贯彻落实党中央重大决策部署，最根本的就是要以党的初心为本心、以党的使命为生命，做到真心爱党、时刻忧党、坚定护党、全力兴党.

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The third section of the article calls on everyone to “dare to struggle and be adept at struggle”. The interesting bit is that it makes this comparison:

“Unblocking the ‘domestic circulation’, opening roads when meeting mountains, building bridges when meeting rivers. During the Long March, Red Army officers and soldiers crossed nearly a hundred rivers, using their bodies as bridges; how many died heroic deaths! Today, our country is already the country with the largest number of bridges in the world. As of the end of 2025, the number of highway bridges had reached 1.1441 million, including 12,462 super-large bridges and 203,400 large bridges. Laying out the ‘six networks’, with investment this year expected to exceed 7 trillion yuan; cultivating a ‘big market’, deepening the rectification of ‘involution-style’ competition, and carrying out special actions to remove the choke points and blockages that hinder a unified market and fair competition…

Opening up the ‘external circulation’, breaking through dangers and obstacles, connecting with the world. The century-old dream of the Pinglu Canal has come true, raising the capacity of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor in the west; the annual number of China–Europe Railway Express trains has grown from 1,702 in 2016 to more than 20,000 in 2025; high-quality BRI cooperation is advancing towards new tracks such as green and digital…

‘Building an open, inclusive, interconnected world of common development’, keeping the world in mind, establishing oneself while helping others to establish themselves. Ideals and convictions are the foundation on which the Party is founded and made to flourish, and also the basis on which Party members and cadres settle their lives and stake their being.

On the battlefield of poverty alleviation, Huang Wenxiu gave her life to the mountains; on the front line of grassroots governance, Wu Yaqin willingly became ‘a ball of fire’, devoted to her community for more than 30 years; At the frontier of scientific research, Wang Ji, with a body not supported by legs, ‘cast a shield’ for the country… ‘As long as there are ideals in the heart, family and country in the heart, and a mission on the shoulders, it is possible to stand high and see far and continuously strengthen confidence and strength; it is possible to overcome all difficulties and not be overcome by difficulties, forming a situation in which the whole Party is of one heart and the whole country is one chessboard, truly implementing the major decisions and plans of the Party Central Committee well, and rallying hearts and pooling strength to conquer one ‘Loushan Pass’ and ‘Lazikou’ after another’.”

从构建新发展格局来看。畅通“内循环”，逢山开路、遇水架桥。长征途中，红军将士跨越近百条江河，以身作桥，几多壮烈牺牲！如今，我国已是世界上桥梁最多的国家，截至2025年底公路桥梁已达114.41万座，其中特大桥12462座、大桥20.34万座。布局“六张网”，今年投资预计将超7万亿元；培育“大市场”，深入整治“内卷式”竞争，开展破除妨碍统一市场和公平竞争卡点堵点等专项行动……打通“外循环”，冲破险阻、联通世界。平陆运河百年梦圆，提升西部陆海新通道容量；中欧班列年开行量由2016年的1702列增长到2025年的超2万列；高质量共建“一带一路”向绿色、数字等新赛道迈进……“建设开放包容、互联互通、共同发展的世界”，胸怀天下、立己达人。理想信念是立党兴党之基，也是党员干部安身立命之本。脱贫攻坚战场，黄文秀把生命献给大山；基层治理一线，吴亚琴甘做“一团火”、心系社区30余年；科研攻关前沿，王戟用没有双腿支撑的身躯为国“铸盾”……“只要心中有理想、胸中有家国、肩上有使命，就能站得高看得远，不断增强信心和力量；就能压倒一切困难、不为困难所压倒，形成全党一条心、全国一盘棋，切实把党中央重大决策部署贯彻落实好，凝心聚力征服一个个‘娄山关’、‘腊子口’。”

Also on the page is a report on Wang Huning meeting with Tran Thanh Man, chairman of the National Assembly of Vietnam, in Beijing. Xinhua says:

“Wang said that China stands ready to work with Vietnam, following the strategic guidance of the top leaders of the two parties and two countries, and guided by the overarching goals characterized by ‘six mores’, to advance high-quality and mutually beneficial cooperation across all areas and the building of a China-Vietnam community with a shared future. The CPPCC National Committee is willing to deepen exchanges and cooperation with the Vietnamese side and contribute to each other’s modernization efforts, he added.”

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Page 2: There’s an important article by Liu Zhenzhong, who is the Director and Research Fellow of the Innovation Strategy Research Office (New Quality Productive Forces Research Office), Institute of Industrial and Technological Economics at the NDRC. Liu is writing about the Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Developing New Quality Productive Forces, which were made public on October 9.

My nutshell take:

“This is a significant commentary. Liu’s piece offers an authoritative view on what the new Opinions mean in practice. The central government is drawing clear boundaries of fiscal prudence. Wasteful investment, bubbles with economy-wide spillovers, the misuse of policy and the abuse of borrowing to chase headline projects, and the erosion of traditional industries are all weighing heavily on the minds of central policymakers. To me, the piece lays bare the central–local friction at the core of the system. It also says something about Xi’s struggle to rework the model of directed improvisation for the so-called new era.

Xi’s adaptation of the directed improvisation model has tilted towards greater direction than greater improvisation. This intensified control was meant to curb the excesses of the earlier era, but it has produced its own, i.e., when the centre names the priorities and rewards alignment, local governments converge on the same sectors, and headlong rushes follow. What the new Opinions are now asking for—adapting new-quality productive forces to local conditions, differentiating, and resisting the urge to pile in—is in effect a call for more improvisation. Yet the structural centralisation of the past decade has weakened the local initiative and appetite for risk that such improvisation requires, and the Opinions’ threat of accountability for losses is likely to weaken it further.

Liu’s article also shows the centre asking for a great deal at once. It wants localities to stick to the real economy rather than the virtual one, and to upgrade traditional industries rather than abandon them, a position that itself reflects considerable internal debate. It also wants them to experiment in new areas, play to local strengths, and balance other goals such as regional coordination, jobs, environmental limits and security. It wants them to be careful with money and debt, yet keep innovating and aim for long-term goals rather than quick wins, even though such innovation takes years to pay off. And it wants them to avoid duplicating each other, which is hard when money tends to chase whatever is already succeeding.

Much of this, especially the call to avoid quick wins, runs up against the incentives local cadres face. Their tenures are often too short for these investments to mature, and they need visible results to get noticed and promoted. The warning against rushing in, therefore, cuts against the very career logic the system rewards. These tensions run throughout the article. Telling cadres to ‘have a sense of urgency, but not become impatient; dare to venture and experiment, but also firmly hold the bottom line’ is much easier said than done.”

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Liu says:

“The Opinions explicitly state that there must be no shifting from the real economy to turn to the virtual, no greedy pursuit of size and comprehensiveness, and no creation of bubbles; there must be no phenomena of industrial hollowing-out or industrial rupture; and that there must be no blind pursuit of novelty that attends to one thing at the expense of another. Using the name of developing new quality productive forces to abuse policies in violation of regulations is strictly prohibited, and those responsible for major losses caused by rushing in en masse or blind investment will be held seriously accountable. Some have understood this as ‘hitting the brakes and cooling things down’, but in fact it is not so. The Opinions are more like the ‘traffic lights’ and the ‘navigation system’ for developing new-quality productive forces, both drawing clear boundaries for innovative exploration in all localities and calibrating the direction for the high-quality cultivation of new growth drivers.” 10月9日，《中共中央国务院关于发展新质生产力的意见》公开发布。意见明确提出，不能脱实向虚、贪大求全、搞泡沫化，不能出现产业空心化或产业断层现象，不能盲目求新、顾此失彼；严禁借发展新质生产力之名违规滥用政策，对一哄而上、盲目投资等造成重大损失的严肃追究责任。有人将其理解为“刹车降温”，其实不然。它更像发展新质生产力的“红绿灯”和“导航仪”，既为各地创新探索划定清晰边界，也为高质量培育新动能校准方向.

“The ‘three must-nots’ build on one another and form a dialectical whole. From the three dimensions of the foundations of development, the succession of growth drivers, and the coordination of methods, they clarify misunderstandings in understanding and deviations in practice concerning ‘how to develop new quality productive forces’.” “三个不能”层层递进、辩证统一，从发展根基、动力接续、方法统筹三个维度，厘清了发展新质生产力“怎么干”的认知误区与实践偏差.

“No shifting from the real economy to the virtual, no greedy pursuit of size and comprehensiveness, and no creating bubbles: the emphasis in this case is on consolidating the foundations of the real economy. New-quality productive forces are led by scientific and technological innovation and rooted in the real economy. Once development becomes detached from the real economy, breaks away from manufacturing and disconnects from industrial chains, and new quality productive forces are simply equated with conceptual hype, capital operations or platform expansion, it becomes easy to generate ‘false heat’. The greedy pursuit of size and comprehensiveness shows up as blindly spreading out operations and expanding scale regardless of conditions, using the word ‘new’ as a signboard to compete for resources. Creating bubbles may cause emerging industries to fall into excessive financialisation and excessive capitalisation before they have even gained momentum. By placing all three side by side, the Opinions are essentially reminding us that the ‘new’ in new quality productive forces must consist of tangible technological progress and improvements in efficiency, rather than figures on paper and illusions created by valuations. All localities must proceed from their own resource endowments and industrial foundations, select development tracks precisely, arrange projects in an orderly manner, uphold the principle of ‘establishing the new before breaking with the old,’ and pursue progress while maintaining stability, thereby avoiding low-level, duplicative construction.” 不能脱实向虚、贪大求全、搞泡沫化，重在筑牢实体经济根基。新质生产力以科技创新为引领，以实体经济为根基。一旦脱实向虚，脱离制造业、脱开产业链，把新质生产力简单等同于概念炒作、资本运作或平台扩张，就容易催生“虚火”。贪大求全，则表现为不顾条件盲目铺摊子、扩规模，把“新”字当作争取资源的招牌。搞泡沫化，更可能让新兴产业还未成势便陷入过度金融化、过度资本化。意见将三者并列，实质是提醒新质生产力的“新”，必须是实实在在的技术进步和效率提升，而非账面数字和估值幻象。各地须立足资源禀赋、产业基础，精准选择赛道、有序布局项目，坚持先立后破、稳中求进，避免低水平重复建设.

“No industrial hollowing-out or industrial rupture; the emphasis in this case is on promoting an orderly transition from old to new drivers of growth. China’s manufacturing sector covers every category; traditional industries absorb a great deal of employment and form the base of the modern industrial system. Developing new-quality productive forces does not mean ‘setting up a new stove’, still less simply replacing traditional industries with emerging ones. Transforming traditional sectors such as steel, chemicals, textiles and building materials with digital technology, green technology and intelligent equipment can equally give rise to new quality productive forces. If a ‘gap’ opens up in the transition between old and new drivers, with new industries not yet up to strength while old ones have already fallen into disarray, the economy’s base will suffer. ‘Moving towards the new’ and ‘abandoning the old in pursuit of the new’ are two different things. The former is an upgrade, the latter a rupture. Only by promoting an orderly transition and positive interaction between old and new drivers can industrial hollowing-out and industrial rupture be avoided.” 不能出现产业空心化或产业断层现象，重在推动新旧动能有序转换。我国制造业门类齐全，传统产业吸纳大量就业、构成现代化产业体系基本盘。发展新质生产力，不是“另起炉灶”，更不是以新兴产业简单替代传统产业。用数字技术、绿色技术、智能装备等改造钢铁、化工、纺织、建材等传统行业，同样能催生新质生产力。如果新旧动能转换出现“断档”，新产业尚未成势，旧产业已经失序，经济基本盘就会受损。“向新而行”与“弃旧图新”是两回事，前者是升级，后者是断裂。只有推动新旧动能有序转换、良性互动，才能避免产业空心化和产业断层.

“No blind pursuit of novelty that attends to one thing at the expense of another; the emphasis in this case is on overall planning and systematic advancement. ‘Pursuing the new’ is not wrong in itself; the problem lies in the word ‘blind’. When developing new-quality productive forces, some localities tend to direct all their attention to frontier tracks such as AI and biomanufacturing, while neglecting equally important goals such as regional coordination, employment security, ecological constraints and the bottom line of security. New quality productive forces are a systematic undertaking; temporary ‘new’ achievements must not be obtained at the cost of security, fairness, or green development. Properly handling the relationships between government and market, between the quality and the form of industry, between reform and development, and between self-reliance and openness, and coordinating development and security, is precisely the overall requirement for the practice of developing new-quality productive forces. Doing research and development where research and development is suitable, manufacturing where manufacturing is suitable and services where services are suitable, and exploring distinctive and differentiated paths, is the only way to turn comparative advantages into lasting competitive advantages.” 不能盲目求新、顾此失彼，重在统筹兼顾、系统推进。“求新”本身没有错，问题在于“盲目”二字。一些地方在发展新质生产力时，容易把注意力全部投向人工智能、生物制造等前沿赛道，却忽视了区域协调、就业保障、生态约束、安全底线等同样重要的目标。新质生产力是系统工程，不能以牺牲安全、公平、绿色为代价换取一时的“新”绩。统筹处理好政府和市场、质态和业态、改革和发展、自主和开放的关系，统筹发展和安全，正是对发展新质生产力实践的总要求。宜研发则研发、宜制造则制造、宜服务则服务，探索特色化差异化路径，才能把比较优势转化为持久竞争优势.

“The ‘one strict prohibition’ constitutes a rigid red line that must not be crossed. Strictly prohibiting the abuse of policies in violation of regulations under the name of developing new-quality productive forces, and seriously holding accountable those who cause major losses by rushing in en masse or investing blindly. This formulation is highly precise. Cultivating new-quality productive forces involves large inputs, long cycles and high uncertainty; it depends on long-term capital, patient investment and market-based trial and error, and can by no means be achieved quickly through administrative push or debt expansion. A few localities, eager for quick success, treat developing new-quality productive forces as a short-term political achievement/vanity project, blindly building new industrial parks and launching projects, and even leveraging investment through borrowing in violation of regulations; this may look impressive, but it conceals fiscal and financial risks. In developing new-quality productive forces, the government must know what to do and what not to do: it should do a good job of planning and guidance, nurturing the ecosystem and providing public services, letting enterprises play the leading role and the market set the direction. What should be left to market trial and error should be handed to the market; where the government should step in, it should shore up the weak links. Under no circumstances must crude, extensive expansion be pursued in substance under the name of the ‘new’.” “一个严禁”是不可逾越的刚性红线。严禁借发展新质生产力之名违规滥用政策，对一哄而上、盲目投资等造成重大损失的严肃追究责任，这一表述针对性极强。新质生产力培育具有投入大、周期长、不确定性高的特点，依赖长期资本、耐心投入和市场化试错，绝非行政推动、债务扩张所能速成。个别地方急于求成，把发展新质生产力当作短期政绩工程，盲目新建园区、上马项目，甚至通过违规举债撬动投资，看似声势浩大，实则暗藏财政金融风险。发展新质生产力，政府要有所为、有所不为，要做好规划引导、生态培育、公共服务，让企业当主角、市场定方向。该由市场试错的，就交给市场；该由政府补位的，就补齐短板。绝不能以“新”为名，行粗放扩张之实.

“In the final analysis, the ‘three must-nots and one strict prohibition’ answer the question of ‘how to develop new-quality productive forces.’ They require us to properly grasp the relationships between establishing and breaking, the new and the old, and what to do and what not to do. In developing new-quality productive forces, we must have a sense of urgency, but must not become impatient; we must dare to venture and experiment, but also firmly hold the bottom line. Only by clearly delineating the boundaries of what ‘must not’ be done and establishing the red line of what is ‘strictly prohibited’ can we prevent a rush by all to follow suit and the formation of bubbles, and enable new quality productive forces to grow healthily along the tracks of the rule of law and marketisation.” “三个不能、一个严禁”，说到底是在回答“怎样发展新质生产力”。它要求我们把握好立与破、新与旧、为与不为的关系。发展新质生产力，既要有紧迫感，也不能有急躁症；既要敢闯敢试，也要守牢底线。把“不能”的边界划清楚，把“严禁”的红线立起来，才能防止一哄而上、泡沫化，让新质生产力在法治化、市场化轨道上健康生长.

“With a new trend emerging, even greater steadiness of purpose is required. New quality productive forces are not ‘old wine in a new bottle’, but a profound transformation in the mode of development. Only if every locality firmly grasps the practical guideline of the ‘three must-nots’, strictly observes the rigid bottom line of the ‘one strict prohibition’, respects the laws of industrial development, adapts measures to local conditions and safeguards the security of development, can it promote an orderly transition and positive interaction between old and new drivers of growth, and continuously turn new quality productive forces into hard-core momentum for high-quality development.” 风口当前，更需定力十足。新质生产力不是“新瓶装旧酒”，而是发展方式的深刻变革。各地牢牢把握“三个不能”的实践准则、严守“一个严禁”的刚性底线，尊重产业规律、坚持因地制宜、守住发展安全，才能推动新旧动能有序转换、良性互动，让新质生产力源源不断转化为高质量发展的硬核动力.

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Page 3: There’s a Zhong Sheng commentary on China-Europe ties. It says:

“On 8 and 9 October, the second regular meeting of the China–EU Trade and Investment Consultation Mechanism was held in Beijing. Based on the positioning of China and Europe as stable and balanced key trade partners, the two sides took stock of the progress of consultations in various fields since the mechanism’s first meeting, held pragmatic and fruitful discussions on important China–EU economic and trade issues, formed a list of outcomes and consensus, and issued a joint statement. Against the backdrop of the world economic recovery under pressure and the rise of anti-globalisation sentiment, China and the EU, within the framework of WTO rules, have managed differences and advanced cooperation through reciprocal, professional and constructive dialogue, injecting a valuable measure of stability into a world economy full of uncertainty.” 10月8日至9日，中欧贸易投资磋商机制第二次例会在北京举行。双方立足“稳定、平衡的中欧关键贸易伙伴”定位，盘点机制首次会议以来各领域磋商进展，就中欧经贸重要议题进行务实、富有成效的讨论，形成成果共识清单并发布联合声明。在世界经济复苏承压、逆全球化思潮抬头的背景下，中欧在世贸组织规则框架下，以对等、专业、建设性的对话管控分歧、推进合作，为充满不确定性的世界经济注入了宝贵的稳定性.

“Dialogue is a path to win-win outcomes, anchored in rules and propelled by reason; it reflects the strategic clear-headedness of both China and the EU. The outcomes and consensus reached on this occasion, comprising 16 specific items, cover key areas such as balance in trade and investment, export controls, intellectual property and WTO reform; they respond to the common concerns of the business communities on both sides and also lay the foundation for the two sides to further expand cooperation. China and the EU both recognise that ‘the successful convening of the second regular meeting is a new starting point, not an end point’. This formulation shows that although there are differences between China and the EU, as long as the principles of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit are upheld and each other’s legitimate concerns are fully accommodated, the two sides have every wisdom and ability to find a path to resolving problems properly. International public opinion generally holds that this regular meeting effectively demonstrated the operational effectiveness of the consultation mechanism, is conducive to stabilising market expectations, and benefits both China and the EU and the world economy.” 对话是以规则为锚、以理性为帆的共赢之道，体现了中欧双方的战略清醒。此次达成16条具体内容的成果共识，覆盖贸易和投资平衡、出口管制、知识产权、世贸组织改革等重点领域，回应了双方产业界的共同关切，也为双方进一步拓展合作奠定了基础。中欧都认可“第二次例会的成功召开是新起点，不是终点”，这一表述表明，中欧之间虽有分歧，但只要秉持相互尊重、平等互利的原则，充分照顾彼此合理关切，双方完全有智慧、有能力找到妥善解决问题的路径。国际舆论普遍认为，此次例会有效展现了磋商机制的运行成效，有利于稳定市场预期，惠及中欧双方和世界经济.

“The essence of China–EU economic and trade relations is mutual benefit and win-win outcomes. The current structure of bilateral trade reflects a two-way choice by both sides based on their respective comparative advantages, and is an inevitable result of the operation of market forces. In 2025, China–EU trade in goods reached $828.11 billion, up 5.4% year-on-year, while the stock of two-way investment exceeded $280 billion, and each is the other’s second-largest trading partner. In the first half of 2026, despite disruption from the countercurrent of protectionism, trade in goods between China and the EU grew by 14.2% year on year, reaching $447.88 billion. From automobiles and new energy to biomedicine and machinery and equipment, the two sides’ industrial and supply chains are deeply interwoven and mutually complementary, while their supply-and-demand markets are highly interdependent. A solid structure of shared interests has long since taken shape. The firm commitment of both sides to their positioning as key trade partners, their continued efforts to stabilise bilateral economic and trade relations and to make trade more balanced, are not only pragmatic steps in keeping with the reality of deep economic and trade integration between China and the EU, but also demonstrate their shared sense of responsibility to provide greater certainty to the world.” 中欧经贸关系的本质是互利共赢。当前双边贸易结构是双方基于各自比较优势的双向选择，是市场规律作用的必然结果。2025年中欧货物贸易额达8281.1亿美元，同比增长5.4%，双向投资存量超2800亿美元，双方互为第二大贸易伙伴。2026年上半年，尽管保护主义逆流干扰，中国与欧盟货物贸易额同比增长14.2%，达到4478.8亿美元。从汽车、新能源到生物医药、机械设备，双方产业链供应链深度互嵌、优势互补，供需市场高度依存，早已形成稳固的共同利益格局。双方坚定彼此关键贸易伙伴定位，持续稳定双边经贸关系、推动贸易更加平衡，既是顺应中欧经贸深度交融现实的务实之举，也彰显了双方共同为世界提供确定性的责任担当。

“Europe has a deep-rooted tradition of free trade and has long been an important builder of an open world economy. China has noted that, for some time, the EU has successively introduced a number of trade defence measures and industrial policies, and that the spillover effects of these measures have attracted international attention. Politicising economic and trade issues, subjecting them to an excessively broad conception of national security, and erecting unreasonable barriers to trade and investment not only run counter to the WTO principle of fair competition, but will also disrupt the stability of global industrial and supply chains and, ultimately, will not be conducive to the transformation and upgrading of Europe’s own industries. An analysis by the British publication The Economist hits the nail on the head: if Europe wants its industry to thrive, its focus should not be on keeping competitors out, but on ‘addressing its own accumulated internal ills.’ Many perceptive people in Europe have already pointed out that the key to enhancing industrial competitiveness lies in resolving internal structural problems, rather than simply restricting external competition.” 　欧洲有着深厚的自由贸易传统，长期是开放型世界经济的重要建设者。中方注意到，一段时间以来欧盟陆续出台多项贸易救济措施与产业政策，相关举措的外溢影响引发国际社会关注。将经贸问题政治化、泛安全化，设置不合理的贸易投资壁垒，既有违世贸组织的公平竞争原则，也会扰乱全球产业链供应链稳定，最终也不利于欧洲自身产业的转型升级。英国《经济学人》的分析一语中的：如果欧洲希望工业兴旺，着力点不应是把竞争者阻挡在门外，而应是“解决自身内部的积弊”。欧洲已有不少有识之士指出，提升产业竞争力的关键在于破解内部结构性问题，而非简单限制外部竞争.

“China has always been a partner for Europe in responding to development challenges, not the source of its problems. The real challenge facing China–EU economic and trade cooperation lies in invoking ‘de-risking’ as a pretext for practising ‘de-cooperation’. China has consistently maintained that mutual dependence is not a risk, the intertwining of interests is not a threat, and open cooperation is the proper path to achieving common development. China’s enormous market, rapidly iterating innovative applications, and comprehensive industrial supporting system are indispensable pillars for Europe’s green transition and the stimulation of scientific and technological innovation. The German Chamber of Commerce in China has pointed out that the specialised expertise and experience German companies have accumulated through their operations in China can effectively help these companies enhance their global competitiveness.” 中国始终是欧洲应对发展挑战的合作伙伴，而非问题根源。中欧经贸合作的真正挑战，在于借“去风险”之名行“去合作”之实。中方一贯主张，相互依赖不是风险，利益交融不是威胁，开放合作才是实现共同发展的正道。中国超大规模的市场空间、快速迭代的创新应用、完备的产业配套体系，是欧洲推进绿色转型、激发科技创新不可或缺的重要依托。中国德国商会指出，德国企业在华经营积累的专业技术与经验，能够有效助力企业提升全球竞争力.

“At present, unilateralism and protectionism continue to spread, placing the international economic and trade order under strain. As staunch supporters of and active contributors to the multilateral trading system, both China and the EU emphasise the value of a rules-based multilateral trading system, support reform of the World Trade Organization, and stress the importance of complying with WTO rules. This shared understanding and position between China and the EU not only helps maintain the stable development of their bilateral economic and trade relations, but also has significance extending beyond bilateral relations. It helps safeguard the global trading order and promote the development of the world economy towards greater openness, inclusiveness, broad-based benefit, balance and win-win outcomes.” 当前，单边主义、保护主义持续蔓延，国际经贸秩序面临冲击。作为多边贸易体制的坚定支持者和积极贡献者，中欧双方均强调以规则为基础的多边贸易体制的价值，支持世贸组织改革，并强调遵守世贸组织规则的重要性。中欧这一共识和立场，不仅有利于维护双方经贸关系的稳定发展，更具有超越双边关系的重要意义，有助于维护全球贸易秩序、推动世界经济朝着更加开放、包容、普惠、平衡、共赢的方向发展.

“Dialogue and consultation are the optimal path for managing differences, while mutually beneficial cooperation is the greatest common denominator for common development. Looking ahead, China is willing to work with the EU, on the basis of complying with WTO rules and taking each other’s core interests into account, to continue resolving frictions and differences through dialogue and consultation, continually discover new potential for cooperation and expand new areas of cooperation, and jointly contribute China–EU strength to promoting global economic growth and safeguarding the security and stability of global industrial and supply chains.” 对话协商是管控分歧的最优路径，互利合作是共同发展的最大公约数。面向未来，中方愿同欧方一道，在遵守世贸组织规则、照顾彼此核心利益的基础上，持续通过对话磋商化解摩擦分歧，不断挖掘合作新潜力、拓展合作新空间，共同为促进全球经济增长、维护全球产业链供应链安全稳定贡献中欧力量.

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The objective of the EU’s new steel regime and structured rules, which came into effect on July 1st, 2026, is to replace the 2018 safeguard measures, drastically restructuring steel trade defenses to protect domestic industries from global overcapacity. Under these new rules, a revised tariff-rate quota (TRQ) system puts a hard limit on the global cap of duty-free steel imports into the EU at 18.35 million metric tons annually, a 50 per cent reduction on previous global tariff-free import caps.

There are also country allocation pools reserved exclusively for EU’s FTA partners and countries supplying more than 5 per cent of historical EU steel imports. Other countries compete on a first-come, first-served basis for a residual pool. There is a 50 per cent penalty for all out-of-quota shipments. While shipments within an allocated quota remain duty-free, any additional steel is hit with a 50 per cent out-of-quota tariff, which is double the 25 per cent penalty of the 2018 regime. Additionally, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is now in place; this TRQ provides no exception for CBAM. Even if steel enters the EU duty-free under the quota, importers must pay a carbon levy based on greenhouse gas emissions, estimated at approximately 35 per cent of the total shipment value. Along with that strict rules of origin have been implemented to prevent transshipment and circumvention via third countries, defining legal origin as the country where the steel was first produced from liquid state into its first solid shape.

As per the India-EU FTA legal text, especially the Annex 2B, released on September 11, 2026, India received a total country-specific annual tariff-rate quota of 1.64 million metric tonnes. This structure consists of two parts: the Most Favored Nation (MFN) baseline quota, which allows the 0 per cent duty standard WTO-based quota of 946,616 metric tonnes, and an FTA preferential quota of 694,854 metric tonnes, which is an additional guaranteed quota carved out under the proposed India-EU FTA. Together, under this new steel regime India receives a total quota of approximately 1.64 million metric tons.

However, India currently exports around 2.4 million metric tonnes of steel products to the EU annually. Before the FTA, the baseline protection relied solely on the WTO MFN quota of 946,616 metric tons, which protected only 39.4 per cent of India’s 2.4 million metric ton exports at zero per cent tariffs, leaving 60.6 per cent exposed to out-of-quota penalties. As the FTA comes into effect, the combined 1.64 million metric tonne quota protects approximately 68.4 per cent of India’s 2.4 million metric ton export volume from the 50 per cent penalty tariff. The remaining 31.6 per cent of exports exceeding this limit face the 50 per cent penalty. However, 100 per cent of all exports remain subject to the 35 per cent carbon levy unless the EU acknowledges and accepts India’s own carbon trading mechanism as an equivalent to its own.

However, since the legal text is out, there has been a discrepancy in the quota numbers that have been reported. The quota allocations published in the September 11 FTA Annex were approximately 300,000 tonnes lower than the operational allocations published unilaterally by the EU in late June 2026. By formalising this September FTA Annex text, India effectively locks in a permanent baseline that is 300,000 tonnes lower than the operational quota handed out in June. For specific products like hot-rolled coil, there is a deficit of 87769 tonnes, and for cold-rolled coil, a deficit of 51316 tonnes compared to the June 2026 EU allocation.

While the FTA allowed India to secure a higher quota than it would have received without it, the global trend toward protectionism remains concerning. The UK has also implemented its own safeguard measures, cutting global tariff-free import caps by 51 per cent and doubling out-of-quota penalties to 50 per cent . While the UK removed 11 specific commodity codes from safeguard restrictions, permitting unrestricted duty-free entry for 85 per cent of Indian semi-finished slabs and specialty alloy wires, the new UK regime restricts other Indian steel exports.

Compounding these global challenges, India faces a synchronised closure of major markets. With a 33 per cent quota reduction for category 1 HRC in the EU, Indian steel must seek alternative markets, yet the UK cannot absorb this excess, and the EU FTA caps are too tight to accommodate it. When combined with the US’s 25 per cent Section 232 tariff and the looming threat of a 100 per cent tariff, it is clear that India is facing a synchronised closure of major global markets for its steel exports. This is the wider trend that India must now confront.

Many of the world’s major consumer blocs are turning inward to protect their domestic industrial bases. Some go to extremes, like the US, while the UK and EU attempt to protect their industries through limited scopes, such as steel or new carbon border adjustment mechanisms. FTAs alone cannot cushion the global export crisis. However, they certainly guarantee some degree of market access over non-FTA partners. This means India must aggressively leverage its economic position to secure exceptions and reliable market access in the emerging geo-economic order, while simultaneously building domestic capacities in carbon trading schemes, such as the one now accepted by the UK.

At the UN Security Council, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei noted a critical division of labor in discovering the novel enzyme system ‘ART’. The AI model Claude led the literature review and conceptualized the experimental design, while humans ran and verified the experiments in the lab. Around the same time, OpenAI moved its “GPT-Rosalind” AI Model, specifically designed for accelerating life sciences research, into controlled commercial access. These advancements led to speculations that biology research is transitioning to AI-led labs or Self-Driving Labs (SDLs), which combine high-throughput robotics and AI orchestration to create completely autonomous setups, devoid of humans.

The ground reality, however, remains far more nuanced, with many scientists skeptical of the narrative that AI will completely replace human biologists in the wet lab anytime soon. Within the Cynefin framework, experimental biology finds its place on the lower end of predictability with multiple constraints. Its inherently complex nature makes both critical thinking and physical dexterity provided by human expertise quite indispensable. AI’s inherent reliance on existing data sets, combined with the vast amount of unmapped biological diversity, further underscores the necessity of maintaining human oversight in research. Despite these, the rapid advancements in the usage of AI in wet labs cannot be ignored. They point to the possibility of a synergy between human biologists and AI, which can potentially accelerate discovery.

AI-enabled wet lab research can be analyzed across two different stages of an experiment: experimental design and experimental execution. The use of AI in experimental design is abundant everywhere, including India - from reviewing existing literature, reading and interpreting large data sets, screening potential biological candidates, to using it in closed-loop optimization. However, a growing reliance of life sciences research on proprietary, commercialized models like GPT-Rosalind can end up putting Indian biologists on the disadvantaged side of the AI divide due to high licensing costs and accessibility barriers. While the establishment of shared AI-ML infrastructure centers for biotechnology called “Moolankur” Bio-AI Hubs is a welcome move for physical capacity generation, research fellowships like “IndiaAI” seem to be inadequate for human capacity generation in this regard. To generate 30 million high-value jobs in the bioeconomy by 2035, as envisioned in NITI-Aayog’s report, there is a vital requirement to train all of the existing and upcoming experimental biologists on the usage of AI. Traditional biology programs must integrate AI upskilling courses that mandate students to complete rotations in coding, data pipeline management, and basic lab automation.

The follow-up stage after experimental design is experimental execution, which involves physical verification of the hypothesis through various processes under an experiment. For execution of experiments, automated laboratories are being actively explored, and self-driving labs are being ambitiously conceptualized. In all of this, AI positions itself in the role of an orchestrator of collaborative robots that carry out all the procedures required for an experiment. For labs across the world, the primary bottleneck in building such self-driving labs is no longer just physical machinery, but the complex orchestration software required to connect heterogeneous laboratory instruments into seamless, autonomous workflows. For India, this presents a unique strategic opportunity. India’s massive IT and software engineering ecosystem can be utilized and incentivized in building lab-orchestration software packages, positioning India as an upcoming global leader in this critical domain.

The transition towards AI-enabled wet labs will not lead to the end of human-led experimental biology, but rather push for its transformation. For India, the path forward lies in a two-pronged strategy - upskilling experimental biologists in AI applications, and strategically leveraging its IT ecosystem to dominate the upcoming lab-orchestration software industry.

The ensuing debate has largely been about competition with Jio and Airtel. The more important question about Indian national security and interests is seldom asked or answered: how much control will India actually have over the service once it starts operating?

In April, my colleagues and I examined this question in a Takshashila discussion document, Starlink and Risks for India. We identified three risks: Starlink could remain operational where India wants it switched off; it could withdraw service where India needs it to remain available; and sensitive information from its users could be handled contrary to Indian interests.

These risks arise because SpaceX has full control over Starlink: it operates the satellites, controls the software and can decide which terminals where can connect to the internet. India can only license Starlink and penalise violations and not much else.

Interestingly, the section in Lai’s 2026 speech that talks about the China challenge, was relatively muted and short. His one-line emphasis remained on China’s military aggression and grey-zone tactics, and the call to mobilise towards nationwide defence preparedness sustained in momentum. But then, Lai pivoted to talking about how defence preparedness is for deterrence and not provocation, while such investment in self-defence is still rooted in a willingness to engage in dialogue. Lai’s administration has embodied this dilemma between an increasingly expanding investment in defence budget and asymmetric military capability, and ever-moderating language over China. In fact, Lai talked more about what the international community should do for the island to prevent it from being usurped by force.

Further, probably for the first time, Lai used the Double Ten speech to talk about the competition between the US and China, and how it must be managed to avoid the spiral of the world into more chaos. Most likely, and rather ironically, the reason for this special narrative appearance is the wave of diplomatic back-and-forth between Washington and Beijing. And both times that Trump has met Xi, Taiwan has either been deemed a “bargaining chip,” or left to chance. There has been no iteration by Washington of a commitment to peace and security in the Taiwan Strait, while Beijing has stayed consistent in reiterating the Taiwan question a red line. Not to mention, Trump’s conception of the economic and security competition with China leads to outcomes like Lai being denied transit visits in the US.

Finally, one notable aspect this year, like last year, was that the Chairperson of the Japan-ROC Diet Members’ Consultative Council, Furuya Keiji, was thanked by name in the speech – a likely result of the enhancing importance the Diet in Tokyo is assigning to the Taiwan issue. In the past, delegations of Japanese Parliamentarians, including from the Council, have been invited both by KMT President Ma Ying-Jeou in 2015 and DPP President Tsai Ing-Wen in 2018. Lai has set the precedent of deeming the Council Chair as important a guest as, say, the king of a full diplomatic ally of the island – Eswatini.

If you were wondering where you’ve heard that story before, yes, Rusalka echoes the story of the Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. Dvořák sat at a wooden table in Prague and began writing the opera, composing it entirely without a piano and mapping out a complex web of leitmotifs on paper alone. When circumstances sour, Rusalka discovers the true cost of the arrangement she made, and she is left trapped between two incompatible worlds, entirely stripped of agency.

In Act I of the opera, she stands under a night sky and sings one of classical music’s most celebrated arias: ‘Song to the Moon’ (Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém). Gazing up at the Moon, she begs it to shine into the human world and carry her secret longing across the void to her mortal Prince. But her plea comes at a price - to leave her lake and join his world, she must bargain with the witch Ježibaba, surrendering her voice and placing her fate in the hands of forces she cannot control.

_{Pavla Vachková as Rusalka, photo: e-sbírky/National Museum, CC BY 4.0}

With modern statecraft increasingly confronting its own version of Rusalka’s bargain, and nations rushing to connect their remote frontiers to the glittering promise of low-Earth orbit broadband, there exists the temptation to trade operational sovereignty for immediate connectivity.

In his discussion paper from April 2026, Ashwin Prasad Rao (Staff Research Analyst for the Advanced Military Technology and Outer Space Programme) highlights why this trade-off is particularly acute with SpaceX’s Starlink. Operating a constellation of over 10,000 active satellites, Starlink offers unmatched bandwidth and low latency. But beneath the technical lead lies the critical vulnerability that operational control remains entirely concentrated in a single foreign private entity. Following Elon Musk’s claims on X that India is blocking Starlink due to “monopolistic oligarchs,” pushing an all-or-nothing choice between total adoption and backwardness, Ashwin explains that satellite mega-constellations carry military logic and security risks that cannot be ignored in his interview on CNN-News18.

Rusalka knew the terms and accepted them anyway. Ashwin’s paper is about weighing them first. Follow the link here. You can also check out his CNN-News18 interview here.

BRICS, SCO and India’s Energy Security Strategy

In her discussion document on Leveraging BRICS & SCO for India’s Energy Security Strategy, Bhumika Sevkani (Research Analyst in Geostrategy Programme) analyses how India can strategically utilise multilateral platforms like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to strengthen its energy security.

While there exists a similarity in the challenges faced by the member states of these groupings, there is little that can be actually done through these plurilateral organisations towards guaranteeing an uninterrupted, affordable and reliable supply of fossil fuels—especially for India. However, cooperation on clean technologies can prove to be advantageous for both economic growth and energy security of the member states.

She highlights that while these plurilateral bodies offer only some assistance in directly securing traditional fossil fuel supplies due to severe geopolitical sanctions and geographic hurdles, they serve as valuable venues for advancing the energy transition. She also suggests that New Delhi should focus on cultivating clean technology partnerships, promoting local currency financing through initiatives such as Maharaja Bonds, and improving alternative transit corridors like the INSTC to diversify both import sources and consumption mixes.

You can check out Bhumika’s document here.

Should India Rethink Its Strategy Towards Washington?

As friction mounts under a transactional US administration, should India continue its traditional posture of diplomatic restraint, or is it time to actively deploy strategic leverage to defend its national interests? Lokendra Sharma (Staff Research Analyst for the High-Tech Geopolitics Programme) and Pranay Kotasthane (Deputy Director and Chair of the HTG Programme) note that New Delhi’s default strategy for decades has been to absorb short-term costs and play down disputes to preserve long-term alignment with Washington.

India should not wait for a future moment when it is more powerful to exercise leverage over the US when it has a menu of options to consider today.

With escalating tariff threats and coercive legislation, playing down conflicts may no longer yield strategic patience. Instead, India must begin targeting areas of high vulnerability asymmetry and US domestic political salience.

Dive into their opinion piece in the Hindustan Times here.

Policy Shifts to Watch in Odisha, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu

While we are yet to see what will become of the set of political experiments that the new changes in government in Odisha, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, their outcomes might show us what actually works. In his column for The Mint, Narayan Ramachandran (Co-Founder) concedes that this isn’t a natural experiment with a control group, but says that the three states are heading in different directions. Odisha and West Bengal are moving toward closer alignment with the Union, while Tamil Nadu is keeping its distinct political philosophy but governing in a more technocratic style. He says early results should be visible well before the new governments’ first terms end.

Check out Narayan’s views on potential policy shifts under the new state governments here.

In-House Event

We had Mr. Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Former Minister of Finance of Tamil Nadu, who visited our office talk about his experiences in politics in a discussion with Nitin Pai (Co-Founder and Director).

Takshashila Academic Conference - October 2026

The Takshashila Institution conducted a two-day online Academic Conference for its 45th cohort of the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (GCPP) course on the 3rd and 4th of October 2026. The theme of the conference was ‘India in a Changing World Order’ and covered 4 different tracks: Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, Emerging Technology, and Domestic Reforms.

Several prominent scholars and experts participated in the conference to give our students an overview of various policy domains, ranging from foreign capital and economic security to understanding India’s perspectives in an international order, India’s labour market, and technology geopolitics.

ATP of the Week: Civic Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t

In this episode, Sowmya Prabhakar (Chief Operating Officer) converses with Kuldeep Dantewadia about Civic Innovation: What Works, What Doesn't. How does civic innovation actually work on the ground? Sowmya and Kuldeep discuss the three forces that shape it: samaaj (community), sarkaar (state) and bazaar (market). They cover why awareness rarely turns into action, what it takes to keep young people engaged, where citizens outperform the state and where they don’t, and what the market gets right and wrong about community work. The framework and tools that Kuldeep shares give enough pointers to convene people to bring about change and what it takes to delve into keeping the learning muscle active by gathering, growing and repeating this process.

Listen to this episode of All Things Policy here.

Lighthouse Keepers: Takshashila Alumni in Action

In this section of the Dispatch, we’re turning the spotlight onto alumni of our public policy courses, or ‘lighthouse keepers’, to hear their reflections from their time with Takshashila’s Policy School.

This week we’re featuring Rohan Chavan, Location Head — Corporate Security, Goldman Sachs and an alumnus of the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Cohort 38).

I find there are very few forums where questions specific to the city, its schools, its housing, its public transport, are examined with rigour and debated openly, involving the academician as well as the common public. That absence is the challenge I am trying to address.

Two policy issues concern me most urgently. First, urban primary and secondary schooling, where enrolment has improved dramatically but learning outcomes remain deeply poor. Children in Mumbai’s municipal schools are in classrooms, but are they learning? The data says largely not. Second, Mumbai’s housing crisis, a city where affordability, redevelopment, and infrastructure have created one of the most complex urban policy puzzles in the country, and urban transport, which still remains infrastructurally inadequate to meet rising demands.

Through the Mumbai Policy Collective, a Takshashila alumni initiative, I am building a space to have conversations around these and many more subjects concerning the city, the state, and policy in general bringing together researchers, journalists, and practitioners to examine what the evidence says and what policy needs to do. Takshashila gave me the tools to move from opinion to analysis, and the conviction that policy engagement is not the preserve of insiders. MPC is my attempt to build that culture in Mumbai.

Takshashila Tabletop Trove!

Welcome back to the old faithful, Tabletop Trove of Dispatch! This little section of our newsletter has become a virtual repository of the books that sit at a high table located in Takshashila’s physical office space in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

1. Fiscal Fables: A Citizen’s Guide to Public Finance (Sarthak Pradhan and Pranay Kotasthane)

2. We, the Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic (Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur and Pranay Kotasthane)

3. Taming the Dragon: A Manifesto for a New Modus Vivendi with China (edited by Manoj Kewalramani)

4. When the Chips are Down: A Deep Dive into a Global Crisis (Pranay Kotasthane and Abhiram Manchi)

5. Missing in Action (Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley)

   ---

This edition of the Dispatch was written by Leah Govias, Programme Manager for Takshashila’s Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Defence and Foreign Affairs)

The transition was triggered by a familiar combination of problems — rising electricity tariffs, an unreliable national grid, and frequent load-shedding faced by thousands of households and businesses. The tipping point was possibly the energy shock following the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, when global gas prices surged and Pakistan struggled to secure affordable fuel. Severe power cuts and shortages were recorded nationwide, especially during the summer months.

This was when solar energy offered a way out. Chinese panels became an increasingly affordable alternative, installation costs were dipping, and Pakistan’s net-metering system allowed households and small businesses to sell surplus electricity back to the grid. From 2013 until mid-2025, solar imports were essentially free of taxes and duties. Under the current tax framework, imported solar panels are subject to a 10% sales tax, while customs duty remains at zero.

The result has been an extensive expansion of distributed solar. Between FY2023 and FY2025, around 27 GW of distributed solar was installed across Pakistan, approximately on par with the capacity of the country’s coal, gas, and oil plants. By June 2025, reported estimates put Pakistan’s distributed solar capacity at around 38 GW, with the figure consistently ascending as imports continued. By the first quarter of 2026, solar accounted for 32.3% of total grid generation, making it the largest individual source of electricity on the system.

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A large share of Pakistan’s solar capacity, however, sits behind the meter or remains entirely off-grid. Farmers can install panels to operate an irrigation pump, households can generate and store their own electricity, and factories can use solar power during working hours. Given that the electricity does not necessarily pass through the national grid, it cannot be captured in conventional grid-generation figures.

The scale of the shift is evident even in the recorded electricity. Solar generation increased from 7.7 TWh in 2022 to 36.6 TWh in 2025. The actual contribution is likely higher once rooftop and off-grid generation is taken into account. Much of the equipment driving this expansion has come from China. Pakistan became one of the world’s largest markets for Chinese solar panels, while the country itself has barely any large-scale domestic solar-panel manufacturing capacity.

Economic Repercussions

The economic impact of this shift is already visible in Pakistan’s reduced dependence on imported oil and gas. Renewables First and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air estimate that the growth of solar saved Pakistan approximately 12 billion USD in oil and gas imports by February 2026. The solar revolution may have also provided some relief from the disruption to global energy markets caused by the 2026 conflict involving Iran, especially given that the Strait of Hormuz remains a crucial maritime transit for Pakistan’s energy supplies from the Gulf.

The shift, however, is accompanied by newer challenges for Pakistan’s already strained power sector.

The country’s electricity system was built around large power plants, long-term contracts and a centralised grid. Under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Pakistan added significant coal-fired generating capacity, with multiple projects funded through Chinese lending and backed by long-term power-purchase agreements. Nevertheless, the economics of these plants haven’t gone as planned given consumers’ shift towards cheaper self-generation options.

Between 2022 and 2024, the utilisation rate of some imported-coal plants declined sharply, while Pakistan accumulated substantial outstanding payments to Chinese power producers. The administration will continue to seek ways to restructure or extend repayment periods for its power-sector obligations.

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This is bound to create a vicious cycle for the government. As solar installation goes higher, demand for grid-supplied power will continue to fall. Nevertheless, the grid still has to be maintained, and Pakistan remains bound by long-term contractual obligations to power producers. This can put further pressure on electricity tariffs. Higher tariffs, in turn, make rooftop solar even more appealing.

Pakistan’s energy transition is therefore unusual. Millions of households, farmers and businesses have effectively begun changing the country’s electricity system from the bottom up, driven less by climate concerns and policy than by the economics of survival. The government is now left playing catch-up with a transition that has been set in motion by the consumers.

Thank you for reading this edition of Paigham. I have been closely monitoring the developments in West Asia, especially with Pakistan’s involvement in the Saudi-Houthi conflict. To know more, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Executive Summary

The second Trump administration’s strategy towards the Indian subcontinent is not as clearly defined as that of the first. However, its strategy can be inferred from the administration’s official statements, hearings, national security and defence strategy documents, its budget justifications, and supporting legislation. This document identifies six primary US interests in the region under Trump 2.0. It also analyses how US engagement in the subcontinent has remained consistent across security, economic and humanitarian sectors since the Biden administration. Assessing the administration’s approach across these categories, this document identifies key areas where interests diverge between regional actors and the current administration. Based on this evidence, the document argues that India remains at the core of US strategy in the region. This centrality, however, faces significant and growing challenges, as the current administration’s approach increasingly strains the relationship and diverges from India’s interests.

Table 1: Policy Continuity and interest alignment under Trump 2.0¹

That school of thought is realism. And when you apply it to India, the picture that emerges is considerably less flattering than the one New Delhi prefers to project.

India likes to see itself as a civilisational voice, a bridge-builder, a leader of the Global South, a power with the strategic autonomy to chart its own course. Realism asks a simpler question: given India’s neighbours, given the gap in material power between India and them, given the choices India actually faces—what are its real options?

The answer is not comfortable. China is on India’s border, vastly more powerful, and actively hostile. The United States is India’s most important strategic partner, but it is also pushing India around on trade, tariffs, and technology. India cannot side with China, and the US seems to increasingly be demanding an uncomfortably higher price for its partnership. Squeezed between two great powers, with neither the material strength to resist alone nor the luxury of genuine non-alignment, India seems to be a power constrained by capabilities.

To discuss all this, my guest for this episode of The Great Power Show is Professor Rajesh Rajagopalan, who teaches International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He is one of the sharpest realist voices in Indian strategic studies.

We discuss what the world looks like today from the Realist prism. Can the US and China really build a relationship of constructive strategic stability? What bipolarity actually means for a country in India’s position? Is strategic autonomy is an aspiration rather than a strategy? And what India should be doing in BRICS and the SCO, and how to think about the Russia relationship as it atrophies?

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work that I do, please do write to me. Your support can make a world of difference.

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Executive Summary

Energy security featured prominently in discussions at both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS in 2026, as volatility continues in global energy markets. India can leverage these organisations to attract investments and forge partnerships in clean technology supply chains. This could eventually help in diversifying India’s energy consumption mix, thereby contributing to a resilient energy system. For diversification in oil and gas imports, SCO can play a greater role—given the hydrocarbon reserves in Central Asia—but India should ensure the viability of INSTC to source from the region. Both groupings can contribute to diversifying the critical minerals supply chain as well.

Introduction

At the heart of most challenges faced by emerging economies today lies energy security. With oil and gas prices fluctuating and energy supplies uncertain, states are exploring multiple options to reduce their vulnerability to geopolitical shocks. There are mainly two ways to achieve this for an import-dependent country: import diversification and diversifying the energy consumption mix. India is also taking the necessary steps to diversify both import sources and energy sources, but faces constraints in the form of either sanctions or maritime chokepoints.

Energy security was also prominently featured in discussions at both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS in 2026. Rightly so, as both groupings include energy-consuming and energy-producing countries. While there exists a similarity in the challenges faced by the member states of these groupings, there is little that can be actually done through these plurilateral organisations towards guaranteeing an uninterrupted, affordable and reliable supply of fossil fuels—especially for India. However, cooperation on clean technologies can prove to be advantageous for both economic growth and energy security of the member states.

This document outlines how active participation in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) provides India with a testing ground to de-risk its energy supply, lower capital costs, and boost clean-tech ecosystems.

On 14 September 2026, the US Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink became the first government official anywhere to admit their country possessed weapons in space.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” he told his audience at an annual military conference. “This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

Meink made it clear this was no off-the-cuff remark. When his interviewer asked him to elaborate he simply repliedthat the “phrase was very well thought out, so whatever I said before is what I say again.”

No observer of the dark arts of counterspace would be surprised to learn that the US, China, or Russia operated weapons in orbit. What’s notable is that the US chose to be the first one to acknowledge them. America’s motives are unknown, but it’s possible to make some educated guesses about them as well as the likely consequences.

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What Are These Weapons?

The United States has fielded ground-based satellite jammers for years and even boasted about them in the past. In March 2020, the Space Force declared its Counter Communications System (CCS) operational, describing it as “the Space Force’s first offensive weapon system.”

Little is known about the CCS other than that it’s built by L3Harris, is easy to move around, and is a ground-based jammer that can target communications satellites. It’s latest upgrade is Meadowlands, which was greenlit for service in June. Meadowlands is smaller and, in the words of the Space Force, is meant to “detect, deny, disrupt, and degrade adversary capabilities in active defense of joint force objectives.” The US military plans to buy up to 32 Meadowlands units and 24 even smaller Remote Modular Terminals.

Meink did not disclose which satellites were America’s space weapons but veteran space tracker Jonathan McDowell zeroed down 17 small satellites that have been operating in a GEO drift orbit, a type of near-geosynchronous orbit in which objects drift by longitude. The circumstantial evidence for these being American space weapons is fairly persuasive. The orbit being used appears to have no commercial purpose. The satellites were inserted into orbit over four different launches using Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE) tugs, which the US typically use for strategic purposes. As McDowell writes, the satellites “are clearly a deployed system rather than one-off test vehicles, and treated as highly classified with no orbital data released.”

If McDowell is right, it’s most likely these satellites are jammers of some sort. The geostationary orbit, some 36,000 kilometres above the equator, hosts military communications, early warning and intelligence satellites. Radio energy weakens with the square of distance, so a small transmitter positioned a few kilometres from a target can drown out signals traveling from the Earth’s surface. In McDowell’s words, such satellites “go up next to other satellites and shout real loud in their ear.”

Why Announce Now?

The standard line is that the US wants to send a warning to its adversaries, primarily Russia and China, which have long been concerned about American orbital weapons. During his conversation, Meink argued that while the declaration of the existence of these weapons would enhance deterrence, discussing details about them “would actually not benefit that deterrence.”

I suspect a stronger motive is simply funding. The Space Force’s fiscal 2027 budget request includes $21 billion for space control, a 158 percent increase over 2026. The Golden Dome missile defence programme is also likely to require a steep increase in funding over the coming years. Making the existence of space-based weapons a matter of public could help sustain the flow of money.

For Americans, Meink’s statement also has another happy side-effect. For years, Russia and China have pushed for the draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects or PPWT. The draft was first tabled in 2008, but the US has consistently opposed the PPWT on the grounds that it doesn’t cover Earth-based space weapons like Direct Ascent Anti-Satellite Missiles or DA-ASATs.

Back in 2004, the Russians had also pledged that would it not be the first to place weapons in outer space. By 2025, Russia had managed to get 36 other countries including India to join its moratorium. What drove this diplomatic effort was the fear that the US would eventually develop an effective space-based missile defence system that would erode Russia’s nuclear deterrent. What the US declaration does is make those years of Russian diplomacy redundant.

Of course, I don’t think it’s that simple. Russia long expected something like this, especially with the Golden Dome programme. It will pivot and seek to constrain the US in other ways. The US announcement is likely to have many unintended consequences in the years ahead.

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It is an all-virtual, Saturdays-only course that runs between November 7 and 28, 2026. After successfully completing a three-week pioneering cohort in 2025, comprising defence personnel, journalists, industry professionals, think tankers, students, and China enthusiasts, we are back with two additional units and more… firepower!

Apply Here

We are accepting rolling applications till the 4th of November, 2026.

Check out our learning units:

I hope you do take up this chance to discuss more China, and more PLA, with my colleagues and me. That said, ~happy reading~!

Three Thing Thoughts #4: India’s Actions and China’s Reactions

Anushka Saxena

Welcome back to ‘Three Thing Thoughts’, where we cover three pieces of news and comment on India that have caught the attention of netizens on Chinese media platforms, in the past two weeks or so. Today, I have unearthed three exciting comments covering the military and economic gamut of interventions from Sohu, China.com, and Guancha. At its core, each piece aims to somehow debunk or demystify a particular decision by India. In doing so, each explains Chinese commentators’ views, sentiments, and thought processes on such decisions – and, by some leap of extension, on India.

Firstly, two of the three pieces in this edition interestingly talk about the same six American F-35s, but in slightly different contexts. On September 26, 2026, six USAF F-35As landed in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, for Exercise Tarang Shakti 2026, the Indian Air Force’s multi-country aerial exercise set to run until October 12. Chinese commentators have had plenty to say about it ever since. The first piece, from a self-media account on Sohu and Toutiao, essentially indulged in equating the landing of the F-35s with India’s Pakistan policy. The second, according to Blue Star Miscellany (蓝星杂谈) on China.com’s military channel, is more concerned with why the IAF cares about flying with F-35s at all.

India’s Two Fronts

The Sohu piece, published on October 4 by a commentator who goes by the handle Xiaozhi, actually comes with the headline of an “unprovoked war” (不宣而战) on the Pakistan border. The incident being referred to is an October 2 shooting undertaken by Indian Border Security Forces in Kasur, Punjab. Xiaozhi took it to imply some new aggravated policy, and conflated it with a war situation – a stance that often helps Beijing prop Islamabad’s actions up. Not to mention, it shows a haste in declaring such responses “recklessness,” while the nuance underneath is often left unexplained for Chinese audiences.

In a usual return to narrative, the piece then discusses the modalities of Operation Sindoor and the Chinese version of the story, pitting India’s Rafales against the Chinese PL-15E missiles. As always, the underlying technical explanations that have now pervaded the view across the LAC, are reiterated – an AEWC aircraft fed targets to the Pakistani Air Force’s J-10CE’s radar over a data link, so it “detected first, locked on first, and fired first.” Weirdly, the reasoning, however debatable, has more to do with the kill chain than the J-10 or the Rafale itself.

Another evident view comes to light from Xiaozhi’s description of the F-35s themselves – “visible but unattainable,” with the source code withheld and Washington able to ground it “with a single document.” Pakistan, meanwhile, is touted for having secured a “preliminary cooperation mechanism” for the J-35AE, with 40 jets, as well as KJ-500s and HQ-19s SAMs.

It doesn’t bode well to wave the package itself off for any Indian decision-maker aiming to counter China-Pakistan military collusivity. Chinese commentators’ insistence that this is the deal to beat presents a clear picture of the challenge – that the collusivity is here to stay, and the US-India defence partnership is, in their belief, not nearly as effective as what Beijing has to offer to Islamabad.

Sparring Partners?

The piece by Blue Star Miscellany piece, published on September 30, contends that the IAF wants the F-35 as a stand-in for the J-20, whose numbers near the border “continue to increase,” so that Rafale and Su-30MKI pilots can practice against a stealth fighter. Given that the Chinese military challenge is a predominant vector today for Indian defence decision-making, that is a fairly sober – though unofficial – assessment, in my opinion.

The piece then goes on to take apart the comparison – however unprovoked it may be. But the highlights are useful to show the commentator’s belief in the PLA’s capabilities against the US armed forces. It explains, for example, how the F-35 is a single-engine multirole strike platform, while the J-20 is a twin-engine heavy air-superiority fighter built to hunt high-value assets, such as AEWC aircraft, with a top speed of Mach 2. Each jet also has different radar cross-sections, avionics and supercruise capacities. And while the piece concedes that the IAF will at least see how a stealth fighter appears on radar and at what range sensor fusion operates, it reiterates a similar sentiment as Xiaozhi about how the US will not let Indian pilots study stealth coatings, sensor fusion or data-link modes up close.

It is important to note that the piece, like many others in Chinese media this week, harps on the so-called “deal-breakers” for India’s purchase of F-35s – source code, mission data files, and a permanent connection to a US-managed digital network. This piece also references the June 2025 incident where the US “kept” Indian personnel away from the F-35B stranded in Thiruvananthapuram – the jet, of course, belongs to the UK Royal Navy, so the call was probably taken in London.

Broadly, one could take away from such assessments that the Chinese are studying and acknowledging that the SUs and Rafales are just turnkey sales while the Indian AMCA programme is not delivering. It is probably a story with which Indian decision-makers are already familiar, and the Blue Star piece at least articulates more soberly than the Sohu ecosystem has heaped on the IAF this week.

Checking the Receipts

Finally, there’s the Guancha piece by Lai Jiaqi, published on September 21 under the finance (财经) section. It references a figure published by PTI, on how India’s exports to China rose 39% to US$ 9.6 billion between April and August 2026, because of PCB assemblies, smartphones, display modules and telecom equipment. Exports to China, South Africa, Brazil and Russia together rose 34% to US$ 19.9 billion.

The piece’s goal is to temper expectations. It argues that these numbers suffer from the base effect phenomenon – exports to China made up just 4.4% of India’s total in the last fiscal year, while imports from China stood at US$ 131.6 billion. The piece also notes that Chinese customs data show no corresponding rise in PCB imports from India and attributes the gap to differences in classification. It stops short of alleging anything, but it is enough to raise questions in the minds of domestic readers.

It is indeed true that a large share of what India now ships to China is assembled from Chinese components, as Wang Xinxi’s 36Kr piece reminded us in TTT #2. Exports of that kind deepen India’s place in supply chains focused in China, but the trade deficit remains unaddressed. The piece quotes an Indian industrialist from Corona Steel, who himself suggests that China “may be becoming more open to Indian goods” – making, in the commentators’ minds, the PTI numbers more about Beijing’s permissiveness than India’s slow climb.

Food For Thought

The question that fascinates me is this – will commentators like Blue Star Miscellany and Xiaozhi, in another context, recommend that Beijing sell J-10s to India, or stick to revelling in the challenges of India-US defence ties? At the end, it all boils down to friendships and interests. For example, never will such commentary speak to the perils of over-dependence – otherwise, Russia would have found a much more prominent mention in stories about India, and the irony in the context of China-Pakistan defence ties would be hard to miss. Further, when these pieces declare a Chinese-origin data link, kill chain or airframe better than an Indian-owned, or even American one, the comparison they partake in is also the one they like to take apart. In doing so, for me at least, they answer the above-mentioned question in the latter – that China is doing great things for Pakistan that the US will never do for India, but China will not extend that umbrella of goodness to anyone else. Not to mention, I wait to see where the tech transfers and the full disclosures in the China-Pakistan defence equation are – after all, the J-10C is not the same as the J-10C ‘E’.

Eye on China is a weekly newsletter curated by the Geostrategy Programme at The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think-tank based out of Bengaluru, India.

Declaration on the use of AI/ML: Translation from Mandarin to English via the use of LLMs.

He has had two articles in the paper. The one in today’s edition is around India-China relations and the piece last week was around BRICS. I am covering both in today’s newsletter. The India piece is much more of repeating the line that was established after Xi’s visit to Delhi. It’s interesting that he does not talk about Taiwan and Tibet. He does not even euphemistically talk about core interests. That said, some things worth highlighting are:

• The two leaders have set the course that India and China are partners rather than rivals. He argues that this was Xi’s proposition and Modi responded positively.

• He argues that cooperation in new energy, the green economy and artificial intelligence is possible. He also contends that the “foundation of public opinion” can be strengthened via “pragmatic cooperation.” I think this is a rather sensible proposition as compared to other perspectives like we should have better public opinion guidance. It is tangible cooperation that will shape perceptions rather than propaganda.

• On the boundary issue, he says that both sides have been able to maintain peace and tranquillity; but Hu adds that “only by eliminating interference with political wisdom can China-India relations proceed steadily and go far”. Basically, he is critiquing India’s relationship with the US in this regard. Beijing needs to get past this mentality for there to be genuine progress.

• Finally, on BRICS, he is arguing that China expects India’s support for its agenda for the grouping, as Beijing takes over the chair. How tricky this is going to be is something that is covered in the second article in this edition of the newsletter, where Hu expands what he believes is Beijing’s BRICS agenda.

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So, Hu writes:

“In September this year, while attending the 18th BRICS Leaders’ Meeting in New Delhi, President Xi Jinping met with Indian Prime Minister Modi. Following the 2024 Kazan meeting and the 2025 Tianjin meeting, this was the third consecutive year in which the two countries’ leaders held a bilateral meeting. The two sides had a candid and in-depth exchange of views and reached an important consensus that China and India should be partners. President Xi Jinping put forward four points on promoting the steady and long-term development of China-India relations. These represent a distillation and sublimation of the practical experience of China-India relations over the past two years, as they moved from ‘setting out anew’ to achieving ‘further elevation’. They also provide a clear methodology, roadmap and coordinates for action on whether the two countries’ relations can climb to a new level and whether they can advance steadily over the long term.” 今年9月，习近平主席在印度新德里出席金砖国家领导人第十八次会晤期间会见印度总理莫迪。这是继2024年喀山会晤、2025年天津会晤之后，两国领导人连续第三年举行双边会晤。双方坦诚深入交换意见，就中印要做伙伴达成重要共识。习近平主席就推动中印关系行稳致远谈了4点看法，既是对近两年中印关系从“再出发”实现“再提升”实践经验的凝练升华，也为两国关系能否再上台阶、能否行稳致远提供了清晰的方法论、路径指引和行动坐标.

“Calibrating direction with objective and rational strategic perception, holding steady the ‘master switch’ for the two countries’ relations. China-India relations are, in essence, a question of how two neighbouring major developing countries, each with a population of over 1.4 billion, get along with each other. President Xi Jinping clearly pointed out that China and India are cooperation partners rather than rivals, and are development opportunities for each other rather than threats. This is a strategic judgement made on the basis of the two countries’ stage of development and the international environment, and it accords with the common interests of the two countries and their peoples. Prime Minister Modi responded positively, stating that the Indian side has always viewed India-China relations from a strategic height and a long-term perspective, is willing to be partners rather than rivals with China, and regards each other’s development as an opportunity rather than a challenge. The two countries’ leaders have anchored the course for China-India relations, providing the stable expectations that are most scarce at present.” 以客观理性的战略认知校准方向，为两国关系把稳“总开关”。中印关系本质上是两个14亿多人口的相邻发展中大国如何相处的问题。习近平主席明确指出，中印两国是合作伙伴而不是对手，互为发展机遇而不是威胁。这是基于两国所处发展阶段和国际环境作出的战略判断，符合两国和两国人民共同利益。莫迪总理积极回应，表示印方始终从战略高度和长远角度看待印中关系，愿同中国做伙伴而不是对手，将彼此发展视为机遇而非挑战。两国领导人为中印关系锚定了航向，提供了当下最为稀缺的稳定预期。

“Achieving mutual accomplishment with the concept of win-win cooperation, building up ample ‘power source’ for the two countries’ relations. China and India have different national conditions and can entirely draw on each other’s strengths to offset weaknesses, support each other, accomplish each other, and develop together. President Xi Jinping emphasized that the two sides should focus on development as the greatest common divisor, and strengthen friendly exchanges and mutually beneficial cooperation. Over the past two years, institutionalized exchanges and cooperation between China and India have gradually resumed, and the list of cooperation has kept lengthening. In 2025, China-India bilateral trade reached a historic high of $155.62 billion. The two countries’ economic and trade structures are highly complementary, and the prospects for cooperation in fields such as new energy, the green economy and artificial intelligence are broad. Only by continuously improving the foundation of public opinion through pragmatic cooperation can China-India friendship gain a ceaseless flow of momentum and robust and resilient public support.” 以合作共赢理念相互成就，为两国关系蓄足“动力源”。中印两国国情不同，完全可以取长补短、相互支持、彼此成就、共同发展。习近平主席强调，双方应聚焦发展这个最大公约数，加强友好交往和互利合作。近两年，中印两国机制性交流合作逐步恢复，合作清单不断拉长。2025年，中印双边贸易额达到1556.2亿美元的历史高位，两国经贸结构高度互补，在新能源、绿色经济、人工智能等领域合作前景广阔。以务实合作持续改善民意基础，才能让中印友好获得源源不断的动力与强韧的民意支持.

“Eliminating interference with the political wisdom of mutual respect and mutual understanding, firmly building the ‘stabilizer’ for the two countries’ relations. China and India are important neighbours to each other, and some differences left over from history exist between them. The key lies in what kind of wisdom is used to deal with them. In recent years, the 24th Meeting of the Special Representatives on the China-India Boundary Question reached a 10-point consensus, and the 25th Meeting reached an 8-point consensus on outcomes, and peace and tranquillity in the border areas have been effectively maintained. Facts have proven that as long as the spirit of mutual respect and mutual understanding is upheld, differences can be fully kept under control and managed well. Only by eliminating interference with political wisdom can China-India relations proceed steadily and go far.” 以互尊互谅的政治智慧排除干扰，为两国关系筑牢“稳定器”。中印互为重要邻国，存在一些历史遗留分歧，关键在于以什么样的智慧去对待。近年来，中印边界问题特别代表第二十四次会晤达成10点共识、第二十五次会晤达成8点成果共识，边境地区和平安宁得到有效维护。事实证明，只要秉持互尊互谅精神，分歧就完全可以管得住、控得好。以政治智慧排除干扰，中印关系才能行得稳、走得远.

“Benefiting all under heaven through open and inclusive multilateral coordination, expanding the ‘broad pattern’ of the two countries’ relations. China and India are both founding members of BRICS and important members of the Global South. By working together to promote the high-quality development of Greater BRICS cooperation, and strengthening coordination within multilateral frameworks such as the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the G20, the two countries seek to transform the scale of their development into positive energy for safeguarding world peace and development. This year India holds the BRICS chairmanship, and next year China will take over the BRICS chairmanship. The two countries’ mutual support for each other’s BRICS chairmanships is precisely a vivid portrayal of ‘benefiting all under heaven’. Strengthening coordination on the multilateral stage is conducive to promoting Global South cooperation and advancing world multipolarization, and it is also an effective way for the two countries to enhance trust and dispel doubts and move towards each other.” 以开放包容的多边协作兼济天下，为两国关系拓展“大格局”。中印同为金砖创始成员国和全球南方重要成员，两国携手推动“大金砖合作”高质量发展，加强在联合国、上海合作组织、二十国集团等多边框架内的协作，就是要把两国发展规模转化为维护世界和平与发展的正能量。今年印度担任金砖主席国，明年中国将接任金砖主席国，两国相互支持彼此担任金砖主席国，正是“兼济天下”的生动写照。多边舞台上加强协作，既有利于推动全球南方合作、促进世界多极化，也是两国增信释疑、相向而行的有效途径.

“Guided by the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, China and India should maintain strategic composure, persist in moving towards each other, and become a stable force for progress amid a world of intertwined change and turmoil. In doing so, they will make an even greater contribution to peace and prosperity in the region and the world.” 以两国领导人达成的重要共识为引领，中印保持战略定力，坚持相向而行，在变乱交织的世界中成为稳定的进步力量，将为地区乃至世界和平与繁荣作出更大贡献.

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Okay, let’s now see what Hu wrote about the BRICS summit and the BRICS movement going forward.

He begins by talking about Xi’s speech at the first session, where he put forth the “four pioneering forces/vanguards” (四个先锋). This is Hu essentially test-driving a new tifa, which we are perhaps likely to hear a lot more of as China takes over the BRICS chair. The piece is interesting because it clearly pitches China as the leader of the BRICS. It argues that the four pioneering forces offer a tangible vision for practical BRICS cooperation in the future. It’s interesting that Hu folds the four pioneering forces within the broader framework of the community of common destiny. At the same time, he also accepts that BRICS’ expansion has made it much more unwieldy, with different countries having different interests. This is rather candid. But he does add that expansion resolved the question of who is at the table; the job for Beijing now is to give this grouping strategic coherence.

Here’s the piece:

“In the present era, the Global South has grown remarkably strong, and world multipolarization is unstoppable. At the same time, unilateralism and power politics are surging as adverse currents, and the ‘four major deficits’ of peace, development, security and governance are increasing rather than decreasing. As for the BRICS cooperation mechanism, BRICS countries have together travelled 20 years of self-reliance and self-strengthening, of standing together through wind and rain, and of fruitful results. The BRICS cooperation mechanism has become the most influential cooperation platform of emerging markets and developing countries in today’s world. The Four Pioneering Forces are both a profound summation of historical experience and, even more, a programme of action facing the new journey. They point out the direction, goals and points of focus for the high-quality development of Greater BRICS cooperation. The Four Pioneering Forces form a tightly structured and logically self-consistent framework for action. They provide a guide to action for the high-quality development of Greater BRICS cooperation and for the unity and self-strengthening of the Global South, and also inject more certainty, stability and positive energy into world peace and development.” 当今时代，全球南方卓然壮大，世界多极化不可阻挡。与此同时，单边主义与强权政治逆流涌动，和平、发展、安全、治理“四大赤字”有增无减。从金砖合作机制来看，金砖国家共同走过了自立自强、风雨同舟、成果丰硕的20年，金砖合作机制已经成为当今世界最具影响力的新兴市场和发展中国家合作平台。“四个先锋”既是对历史经验的深刻总结，更是面向新征程的行动纲领，指明“大金砖合作”高质量发展的方向、目标和着力点。“四个先锋”构成结构严密、逻辑自洽的行动框架，为“大金砖合作”高质量发展和全球南方联合自强提供行动指南，也为世界和平与发展注入更多确定性、稳定性、正能量.

“The changes unseen in a century call on responsible forces to step forward and shoulder responsibility. The changes unseen in a century are evolving at an accelerated pace, and the Global South is rising as a group. Yet the deficits in peace, development, security and governance have not only failed to disappear but have continued to accumulate. Armed conflicts drag on without resolution, the development gap between the Global North and South continues to widen, and new challenges such as climate change, public health and artificial intelligence are constantly emerging. Enhancing the representativeness, inclusiveness and universality of the global governance system is an irresistible trend. President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative precisely to resolve these deficits and to promote the building of a better world. As the first echelon of the Global South, BRICS countries should bravely serve as leaders in resolving the ‘four major deficits’ and as practitioners who rise and act. Answering the question of the times, ‘Where is humanity headed?’, with the Four Pioneering Forces reflect deep concern for the future and destiny of mankind, and also a conscious commitment in practice to transforming ideas and propositions into common action.” 百年变局呼唤负责任力量挺膺担当。百年变局加速演进，全球南方群体性崛起，但和平赤字、发展赤字、安全赤字、治理赤字不仅未能消解，反而持续累积。战乱冲突延宕难解，南北发展鸿沟持续拉大，气候变化、公共卫生、人工智能等新挑战不断涌现，提升全球治理体系代表性、包容性、普惠性是大势所趋。习近平主席提出全球发展倡议、全球安全倡议、全球文明倡议、全球治理倡议，正是为了破解这些赤字，推动建设一个更加美好的世界。金砖国家作为全球南方第一方阵，要勇做破解“四大赤字”的引领者和起而行之的实践者。以“四个先锋”作答“人类向何处去”的时代之问，体现的是对人类前途命运的深切关怀，也是把思想主张转化为共同行动的实践自觉.

“The development of BRICS calls for a change of mission and a change of path. President Xi Jinping used three key terms, ‘self-reliance and self-strengthening, standing together through wind and rain, and fruitful results,’ to summarize the course of BRICS development. Over 20 years, the BRICS cooperation mechanism has expanded from a starting point of four countries to 11 member countries and 10 partner countries. On the basis of the ‘three-wheel drive’ structure, the ‘BRICS Plus’ cooperation model has continued to expand, and the representativeness and influence of the BRICS cooperation mechanism have continued to rise.Following its expansion, BRICS’s principal task has shifted from ‘major expansion’ to ‘major development.’ Expanding the mechanism resolved the question of ‘who participates.’ Deepening development must resolve the question of ‘forming consensus, coordinating action and producing results.’ The Four Pioneering Forces were put forward at just the right time, with the aim of moving Greater BRICS cooperation from becoming bigger to becoming stronger and achieving high-quality development from a new starting point.” 金砖发展要求使命之变、路径之变。习近平主席用“自立自强、风雨同舟、成果丰硕”3个关键词概括金砖发展历程。20年来，金砖合作机制从四国起步，扩展到11个成员国、10个伙伴国。在“三轮驱动”格局基础上，“金砖+”合作模式不断拓展，金砖合作机制的代表性和影响力持续提升。扩员之后，金砖的主要任务由“大扩员”转向“大发展”。机制扩员解决的是“谁参与”的问题，深化发展则要解决“形成共识、协调行动、产生成果”的问题。“四个先锋”的提出正当其时，旨在推动“大金砖合作”由做大走向做强，在新起点上实现高质量发展.

“A consistent thread of thought runs through BRICS practice and the global initiatives From the 2017 BRICS Leaders’ Meeting in Xiamen, which pioneered the ‘BRICS Plus’ cooperation model and pushed BRICS to expand from a platform for dialogue to a broader network of cooperation, to the 2024 Kazan meeting, which put forward the important concept of the high-quality development of Greater BRICS cooperation, advocated building a ‘peaceful BRICS’, an ‘innovative BRICS’, a ‘green BRICS’, a ‘just BRICS’ and a ‘humanistic BRICS’, and made clear that BRICS should be built into the main channel for promoting solidarity and cooperation in the Global South and a pioneering force for promoting the reform of global governance, President Xi Jinping has continuously pointed out a clear direction of development for BRICS cooperation. At this New Delhi meeting, President Xi Jinping gave the ‘pioneering force’ a more concrete fourfold characterization; the direction of action is now clearer. Of particular importance, the Four Pioneering Forces internally correspond with the GDI, GSI, GCI and GGI, giving BRICS cooperation a more complete system of goals across the four dimensions of development, security, civilization and governance. Being a pioneer does not mean acting as an ‘alliance leader’, nor does it mean engaging in bloc confrontation. Rather, it means ‘maintaining sincerity toward each other, seeking common ground while preserving differences, and respecting each other’s core concerns’. This solemn declaration by President Xi Jinping in New Delhi defined the manner and boundaries of being a pioneer. It can be said that the Four Pioneering Forces are a concrete extension of the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind on the BRICS platform, and are also an important international public good contributed by China to BRICS cooperation.” 思想脉络贯通金砖实践与全球倡议。从2017年金砖国家领导人厦门会晤，开创性提出“金砖+”合作模式，推动金砖从对话平台向更广阔的合作网络拓展，到2024年喀山会晤，提出“大金砖合作”高质量发展重要理念，倡导建设“和平金砖”“创新金砖”“绿色金砖”“公正金砖”“人文金砖”，明确要把金砖打造成促进全球南方团结合作的主渠道和推动全球治理变革的先锋力量，习近平主席不断为金砖合作指明清晰的发展方向。本次新德里会晤，习近平主席对“先锋力量”有了更为具体的四重定性——创新发展、和平稳定、文明互鉴、全球治理，行动指向更加清晰。尤为重要的是，“四个先锋”与全球发展倡议、全球安全倡议、全球文明倡议、全球治理倡议形成内在呼应，使金砖合作在发展、安全、文明、治理四个维度上有了更加完整的目标体系。先锋不是充当“盟主”，不是搞阵营对抗，而是“坚持坦诚相待、求同存异，尊重彼此核心关切”。习近平主席在新德里的这一郑重宣示，界定了先锋的方式与边界。可以说，“四个先锋”是人类命运共同体理念在金砖平台上的具体拓展，也是中国向金砖合作贡献的重要国际公共产品.

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In section two, Hu details the “concrete requirements of the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind in the BRICS undertaking”.

He writes:

“Faced with the question of the times, ‘Where is humanity headed?’, President Xi Jinping has pioneeringly put forward the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind and promoted the implementation of the four major global initiatives, pointing out the correct path for responding to global challenges. The Four Pioneering Forces are the concrete requirements of the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind in the BRICS undertaking, corresponding one by one to major questions of the times. Innovative development corresponds to the question of impetus, peace and stability corresponds to the question of security, mutual learning among civilizations corresponds to the question of cognition, and global governance corresponds to the question of institutions. The four questions have the same source, and the four answers point in the same direction; together they answer the major question of ‘what kind of BRICS to build and how to build BRICS’.” 面对“人类向何处去”的时代之问，习近平主席开创性提出构建人类命运共同体理念，推动落实四大全球倡议，为应对全球性挑战指明了正确路径。“四个先锋”是构建人类命运共同体理念在金砖事业上的具体要求，一一对应重大时代课题：创新发展对应动力之问，和平稳定对应安全之问，文明互鉴对应认知之问，全球治理对应制度之问。四问同源、四答同向，共同回答“建设一个什么样的金砖、如何建设金砖”这一重大课题.

“To be a pioneer in promoting innovative development, seize the initiative in the technological revolution and reshape the power source of common development. A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, represented by AI, is accelerating its breakthroughs and profoundly affecting the pattern of global development. BRICS countries should firmly grasp the initiative, strengthen cooperation on AI, encourage open source and openness, cooperation and sharing, and promote pragmatic cooperation to move towards the new and climb towards the high. President Xi Jinping put forward the BRICS Initiative on Artificial Intelligence Empowering New-Type Industrialization, welcomed BRICS countries to actively participate in WAICO, and expressed willingness to work with all parties to jointly create more research, development and application results and deepen industrial chain and supply chain cooperation. This proposition has a clear pathway and embodies a distinct orientation of using openness and sharing to offset closure and exclusion. Being a pioneer in promoting innovative development is not only catching up on existing technological tracks; it requires even more that the Global South unite and jointly grasp the initiative in development. There are different technological gradients among BRICS countries: some are strong in basic research, some excel at application innovation, and some possess broad markets; they can form organic complementarities, and the space for cooperation is far greater than zero-sum competition. Transforming the dividends of innovation into the driving force for the common development of all countries is the point of arrival of the mission of ‘being a pioneer in promoting innovative development’.” 做促进创新发展的先锋，掌握科技革命主动权，重塑共同发展的动力源。以人工智能为代表的新一轮科技革命和产业变革加速突破，深刻影响世界发展格局。金砖国家要牢牢把握主动权，加强人工智能合作，鼓励开源开放、合作共享，推动务实合作向新而行、向高攀登。习近平主席提出金砖国家人工智能赋能新型工业化倡议，欢迎金砖各国积极参与世界人工智能合作组织，愿同各方共同打造更多研发和应用成果，深化产业链供应链合作。这一主张路径明确，体现了以开放共享对冲封闭排他的鲜明导向。做促进创新发展的先锋，不仅在既有技术轨道追赶，更需要全球南方联合起来，共同掌握发展主动权。金砖国家内部技术梯度不同，有的长于基础研究，有的擅长应用创新，有的拥有广阔市场，能够形成有机互补，合作空间远大于零和竞争。把创新红利转化为各国共同发展的动能，是“做促进创新发展的先锋”这一使命的落脚点.

“To be a pioneer in safeguarding peace and stability, offset bloc confrontation with a common security concept, and provide a stable anchor for a world in turmoil and transformation. During the 2014 Fortaleza meeting, President Xi Jinping stated: ‘For BRICS countries to achieve national prosperity and the people’s well-being, they must walk on two legs, both attaching importance to cooperation in the economic field and strengthening coordination in the political field, being both an anchor of world economic stability and a shield of international peace.’ Over more than 10 years, this role of BRICS countries has been continuously elevated: from an anchor of stability and a shield of peace to a pioneer in safeguarding peace and stability. BRICS countries uphold a vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, oppose the Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation, oppose infringing on other countries’ sovereignty and interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, participate constructively in resolving hotspot issues, thereby making a distinctive BRICS contribution to seeking ways of addressing both symptoms and root causes.” 做维护和平稳定的先锋，以共同安全观对冲阵营对抗，为变乱世界提供稳定锚。2014年福塔莱萨会晤期间，习近平主席提出：“金砖国家要实现国泰民安，必须两条腿走路，既重视经济领域合作，又加强政治领域协调，既做世界经济稳定之锚，又做国际和平之盾。”10余年来，金砖国家这一角色不断升华：从稳定之锚、和平之盾到维护和平稳定的先锋。金砖国家秉持共同、综合、合作、可持续的安全观，反对冷战思维和阵营对抗，反对侵犯别国主权、干涉别国内政，建设性参与热点问题解决，为寻求标本兼治之道作出金砖独特贡献.

“To be a pioneer in promoting mutual learning among civilizations, transcend civilizational conflict through harmony and co-existence, and consolidate the social foundation of relations among countries. Using exchanges among civilizations to transcend estrangement among civilizations, using mutual learning among civilizations to transcend civilizational conflict, and using coexistence among civilizations to transcend civilizational superiority constitute the spiritual core of being a pioneer in promoting mutual learning among civilizations. BRICS countries carry forward ancient civilizations and nurture diverse cultures, and their political systems and development paths are also not entirely the same; they should become a garden of a hundred flowers where different civilizations coexist inclusively. People-to-people exchanges are the social foundation of strategic mutual trust. At the practical level, the BRICS People-to-People and Cultural Exchanges Forum has moved toward normalization, experience in state governance has been shared in depth, cooperation in culture, tourism, education, and other fields has continuously strengthened, and youth exchanges have continued to expand, with the foundation for people-to-people exchanges continuously being consolidated. BRICS countries should carry forward the common values of all humanity, advocate exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations and harmonious coexistence, and bring together more positive energy for the stable development of relations among countries.” 做推动文明互鉴的先锋，以和合共生超越文明冲突，夯实国家间关系的社会根基。以文明交流超越文明隔阂，以文明互鉴超越文明冲突，以文明共存超越文明优越，构成了推动文明互鉴的先锋的精神内核。金砖国家传承古老文明、孕育多元文化，政治制度和发展道路也不尽相同，应当成为不同文明包容共存的百花园。人文交流是战略互信的社会根基。在实践层面，金砖国家人文交流论坛走向常态化，治国理政经验深入分享，文化、旅游、教育等合作不断加强，青年交流持续扩大，人文交流基础不断夯实。金砖国家要弘扬全人类共同价值，倡导文明交流互鉴、和合共生，为国家间关系的稳定发展汇聚更多正能量.

“To be a pioneer in reforming and improving global governance, enhance the voice of the Global South, and promote the international order to evolve in a fairer and more reasonable direction. The essence of the global governance deficit is that the representativeness and inclusiveness of international institutions seriously lag behind reality. For BRICS countries to be pioneers in reforming and improving global governance means leading the Global South to participate in a timely and deep manner in the transformation of the global governance system. This pioneering nature is manifested firmly safeguarding the authority of the United Nations, and opposing withdrawing from groups and tearing up agreements and setting up separate stoves/agreements; supporting the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its core, and opposing the abuse of tariffs and resisting protectionism; reforming and improving the international financial architecture, and raising the representation and voice of developing countries; and enhancing the Global South’s discourse power in the global governance of new frontiers. The New Development Bank is a landmark achievement of BRICS cooperation, an important public good through which BRICS countries lead the Global South in common development, and also an example of BRICS countries reforming and improving global governance. Continuously supplying Global South solutions, shifting rules from being ‘written by a few countries’ to being ‘jointly written by all countries’, is a key driving force for the transformation of the global governance system, as well as a practical pathway for enhancing the voice of the Global South and promoting the construction of a more fair and reasonable international order.” 做改革完善全球治理的先锋，提升全球南方话语权，推动国际秩序向公正合理方向演进。全球治理赤字的本质，是国际制度的代表性和包容性严重滞后于现实。金砖国家做改革完善全球治理的先锋，就是要引领全球南方及时、深度参与全球治理体系变革。这种先锋性体现为：坚定维护联合国权威，反对退群毁约和另起炉灶；支持以世界贸易组织为核心的多边贸易体制，反对滥施关税、抵制保护主义；改革完善国际金融架构，提高发展中国家代表性和发言权；在新疆域全球治理中提升全球南方话语权。新开发银行是金砖合作的标志性成果，是金砖国家引领全球南方共同发展的重要公共产品，也是金砖国家改革完善全球治理的例证。持续供给全球南方方案，把规则从“少数国家书写”转向“各国共同书写”，是全球治理体系变革的关键动力，也是提升全球南方话语权、推动构建更加公正合理的国际秩序的切实路径。

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In the third section, Hu distills the “internal logic” connecting the Four Pioneering Forces. He argues that “promoting innovative development, safeguarding peace and stability, promoting mutual learning among civilizations, and reforming and improving global governance are an organic whole that is interconnected and linked at each step. In grasping the Four Pioneering Forces, it is necessary not only to see their distinctions, but even more to see their unity.” 促进创新发展、维护和平稳定、推动文明互鉴、改革完善全球治理，是相互贯通、环环相扣的有机整体。把握“四个先锋”，既要见其分，更要见其合.

“The problem orientation and goal orientation correspond with each other. The four major deficits are a list of problems, while the Four Pioneering Forces are a task list and responsibility list for resolving the four major deficits. Promoting innovative development resolves the development deficit; safeguarding peace and stability resolves the peace deficit and security deficit; promoting mutual learning among civilizations bridges the cognitive divide; and reforming and improving global governance resolves the governance deficit. Between the four major deficits and the Four Pioneering Forces there is an internal correspondence and logical continuity between ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’, demonstrating the distinct problem consciousness and strong sense of mission and responsibility of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy. The vitality of theory lies in guiding practice; what is valuable about the Four Pioneering Forces precisely lies in transforming major scientific judgments into an action guide that can be followed and advanced against concrete benchmarks.” 问题导向与目标导向相契合。“四大赤字”是问题清单，“四个先锋”是破解“四大赤字”的任务清单、责任清单。以促进创新发展破解发展赤字，以维护和平稳定破解和平赤字与安全赤字，以推动文明互鉴弥合认知鸿沟，以改革完善全球治理破解治理赤字。“四大赤字”与“四个先锋”之间呈现“问题”与“方案”的内在呼应、逻辑贯通，彰显了习近平外交思想鲜明的问题意识和强烈的使命担当。理论的生命力在于指导实践，“四个先锋”的可贵之处，正在于把重大科学判断落实为可以对照推进的行动指南.

“Four-in-one and mutually supporting. Development is the foundation; without development, there is nothing to speak of. Security is the precondition; in a turbulent environment, the fruits of development may be destroyed at any time. Civilization is the bond; lacking mutual understanding and perception, international cooperation finds every step difficult. Governance is the guarantee; if institutional arrangements are unjust and unreasonable, both development and security are hard to sustain. Development, security, civilization and governance are each indispensable, embodying a systems concept and dialectical thinking and constituting a complete framework for action. This framework is internally linked with the ‘three-wheel drive’ structure of BRICS political and security, economic, trade and financial, and people-to-people exchanges: economic, trade and financial cooperation supports innovative development, political and security cooperation supports peace and stability, people-to-people exchanges support mutual learning among civilizations, and the three jointly point towards reforming and improving global governance.” 四位一体、相互支撑。发展是基础，没有发展，一切无从谈起；安全是前提，在动荡环境中，发展成果随时可能被摧毁；文明是纽带，缺乏相互理解和认知，国际合作举步维艰；治理是保障，制度安排不公正不合理，发展和安全都难以持续。发展、安全、文明、治理四者缺一不可，体现系统观念和辩证思维，构成完整的行动框架。这一框架与金砖政治安全、经贸财金、人文交流“三轮驱动”格局内在衔接：经贸财金支撑创新发展，政治安全支撑和平稳定，人文交流支撑文明互鉴，三者共同指向改革完善全球治理.

“The BRICS spirit and the common values of all humanity are internally interconnected. The BRICS spirit of ‘openness and inclusiveness, cooperation and win-win’ is internally interconnected with the common values of all humanity of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom. Non-alignment, non-confrontation, and not targeting third parties; seeking harmony while recognizing differences and harmonious coexistence…these are both practical principles of the BRICS spirit and concrete expressions of the common values of all humanity in international cooperation. It is precisely this value-based continuity that enables the Four Pioneering Forces to transcend regional and cultural boundaries and win broad recognition.” 金砖精神与全人类共同价值内在贯通。“开放包容、合作共赢”的金砖精神，同和平、发展、公平、正义、民主、自由的全人类共同价值内在贯通。不结盟、不对抗、不针对第三方，和而不同、和合共生，既是金砖精神的实践原则，也是全人类共同价值在国际合作中的具体表达。正是这种价值贯通，使“四个先锋”能够超越区域和文化边界，赢得广泛认同. (Note: This is interesting. Hu is seeking to build a common values-based thread connecting BRICS countries. It’s going to be a stretch, but there is clearly an attempt to create “like-mindedness” or a “shared values” narrative.)

China’s responsibility and commitment and the common will of the Global South are unified. At key junctures in the development of BRICS cooperation, China’s propositions have been clear and perceptible, but China’s role has always been leading rather than taking over everything (引领而非包办), contributing solutions rather than exporting models. Based on this logic, the Four Pioneering Forces both embody Chinese wisdom and Chinese solutions and pool the common will of the Global South. They are not an agenda set for BRICS countries from outside, but a common direction distilled from BRICS practice.” 中国责任担当与全球南方共同意志相统一。在金砖合作发展的关键节点上，中国的主张清晰可感，但中国的作用始终是引领而非包办、贡献方案而非输出模式。基于这样的逻辑，“四个先锋”既体现中国智慧、中国方案，又凝聚全球南方共同意志。它不是外部给金砖国家设定的议程，而是从金砖实践中提炼出来的共同方向.

(Note: This is very deftly put. The point is that Beijing sees itself as the leader of the BRICS and Hu is telling us that Beijing clearly has , but this is an organisation that functions with unanimous decision-making. And what Hu is saying is that Beijing has been respecting that proposition and playing ball.)

In the final section, Hu says:

What the Four Pioneering Forces must answer is not only the development path of BRICS countries for the next decade, but even more with what posture the Global South enters the deep-water zone of the reconstruction of the international order. The question of the times and the question of the world converge here.” “四个先锋”要回答的，不只是金砖国家未来十年的发展路径，更是全球南方以何种姿态进入国际秩序重构深水区。时代之问与世界之问，在这里交汇.

“Establishing a programme of action for opening the third ‘golden decade’ of BRICS cooperation. For the BRICS cooperation mechanism, expansion resolves the question of ‘who is present’, while the pioneers make clear ‘where to go’. The more members there are and the more diverse the interests, the more a banner is needed to consolidate the agenda and prevent the fragmentation of issues. The pioneering forces are both the direction of BRICS development and the standard to be tested in practice, signifying a leap from the expansion of scale to executable common tasks at the four levels of development, security, civilization and governance. In 2027, China will hold the BRICS chairmanship for the fourth time and host the 19th BRICS Leaders’ Meeting, and the Four Pioneering Forces set the coordinates for this.” 为开启金砖合作第三个“金色十年”确立行动纲领。对金砖合作机制而言，扩员解决的是“谁在场”，先锋明确的是“往何处去”。成员越多、利益越多元，越需要旗帜来凝聚议程、防止议题碎片化。先锋既是金砖发展的方向，也是实践检验的标准，意味着从规模的扩大跃升至发展、安全、文明、治理四个层面可执行的共同任务。2027年，中国将第四次担任金砖主席国、主办金砖国家领导人第十九次会晤，“四个先锋”为此定下坐标。

Bringing the remarkably growing Global South together on an institutional track for supplying global public goods. The collective rise of the Global South is a historical variable changing the international pattern of the 21st century. BRICS countries are the first echelon of the Global South, accounting for nearly half of the world’s population, about 30% of the world’s total economic output, and one-fifth of the world’s total trade. In the current international system, the strength of the Global South is growing rapidly, but the institutional supply capable of carrying the Global South’s demands and transforming its consensus lags clearly behind, and the Global South has long been in a state of ‘having strength but lacking platforms, having consensus but lacking implementation.’ The Four Pioneering Forces converge the South’s demands, scattered across the various fields of development, security, civilization and governance, into one and the same agenda, and supply global public goods in accordance with a common mission, so that unity and self-strengthening no longer remain at the level of will, but enter a cooperation path that can be participated in, checked against and tested. The Global South thereby moves from the awakening of strength to institutionalized unity, providing a multilateral practical path for building a community with a shared future for mankind.” 把卓然壮大的全球南方聚合到供给全球公共产品的制度轨道。全球南方群体性崛起，是改变21世纪国际格局的历史变量。金砖国家是全球南方第一方阵，人口占世界近一半，经济总量约占世界30%，贸易总额占世界1/5。在当前国际体系中，全球南方力量在快速增长，但能够承载全球南方诉求并转化其共识的制度供给却明显滞后，全球南方长期处于“有实力、缺平台，有共识、缺抓手”的状态。“四个先锋”把分散在发展、安全、文明、治理各领域的南方诉求，聚合为同一套议程，并按照共同使命供给全球公共产品，使联合自强不再停留在意愿层面，而进入可参与、可对照、可检验的合作路径。全球南方也由此从力量觉醒走向机制化联合，为构建人类命运共同体提供多边实践路径.

“Providing constructive solutions for a world in which change and turmoil are intertwined. The Four Pioneering Forces provide Chinese solutions and BRICS solutions for a world in which change and turmoil are intertwined, responding to changes with solidarity rather than confrontation, dealing with imbalances with reform rather than subversion, and healing rifts with cooperation rather than decoupling. Advancing along this direction, BRICS countries contribute the strength of the Global South to advancing an equal and orderly world multipolarization and universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. The BRICS agenda steps from ‘BRICS concerns’ into ‘global concerns,’ and BRICS countries move from being active participants in the system to being suppliers of global public goods. The more the international situation is intertwined with change and turmoil, the more such a constructive force is needed; the more the contest over international rules intensifies, the more such a supply of certainty is needed.” 为变乱交织的世界提供建设性方案。“四个先锋”为变乱交织的世界提供中国方案、金砖方案：以团结而非对抗回应变局，以改革而非颠覆应对失衡，以合作而非脱钩弥合裂痕。沿着这样的方向前进，金砖国家为推进平等有序的世界多极化、普惠包容的经济全球化贡献全球南方力量。金砖议程从“金砖关切”步入“全球关切”，金砖国家从体系的积极参与者迈向全球公共产品供给者。国际形势越是变乱交织，越需要这样的建设性力量；国际规则博弈越是加剧，越需要这样的确定性供给.

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This unit, the report informs, has gone from being at “station duty” to becoming a “regional management” unit, replete with a resource management and scheduling platform that now brings together previously siloed equipment systems onto a single platform for real-time monitoring and dispatch. Now, the report claims, the cross-regional scheduling that once required phone calls to every station now takes one instruction and a few minutes. An anecdotal example it presents is that of an Air Force brigade requesting for a link¹ across thousands of kilometres to “remotely execute missions.” It was apparently set up in under half a day. Further, in an exercise described in the report, the ISF unit’s duty station “obtained the mission from the cloud” and then dynamically allocated network resources to multiple task forces. That could suggest that requests now come in as tasks through the same cloud-based command system, rather than by phone.

Why was the need felt to set the platform up? In addition to the PLA’s obvious march towards system-of-systems (体系作战) thinking and informatisation, one of the failures the report itself lets up is shown to be the trigger. In a past exercise, one of two stations supposed to be working together had a downed information link and the second station did not detect it for 20 minutes. As a consequence, the authorities supervising the drill marked it as a failure, and during the debriefing later, the lead supervisor argued that the first station had essentially become an “information island” (信息孤岛) – a circumstance the cross-regional platform is supposed to solve for.

The report also mentions achievement of stable remote-control signals, which could, in the case of hilly and harsh terrain as that of Tibet and Xinjiang, mean that uncrewed ground vehicles have been deployed. Though the PLA Daily itself doesn’t mention this, one can distill it from previous coverage where, in April 2026, the 82nd group army deployed said UGVs in obstacle circumvention operations.

The report, as alluded to above, also speaks of interesting things ISF duty officers are being made to do – they are no longer just “technicians,” but are now “data officers” who are expected to analyse situations and assist command decisions. Hence, fewer of them are required to sit at the stations themselves, and more are being sent to the ground for joint training support. One example talks about how an army regiment training above 4,000 metres as the ISF in Kunlun to “tailor-make” a network setup for it, which just goes to show how proliferated the ISF’s ground units are – something that the PLA has already discussed in previous coverage of the ISF’s “forward-deployed network-information detachments.”

The PLA’s informatisation project remains slow-moving but real, and its success or failure in the Western Theater Command’s active situations and harsh terrain undoubtedly remain a priority for Chinese military leadership. With a 2027 milestone deadline for the completion of basic informatisation looming large, digital clouds and integrated platforms are likely to become all the rage in training drills. Whether they can survive hypoxia in troops, sustained interferences in radio communications, and even electronic attacks in conflict, remains an open question.

India Policy Watch #1: Gandhi’s India, Forever

Insights on current policy issues in India

—RSJ

It was Gandhi Jayanti this week. Back in the 80s when I was growing up, this day had a particular routine. The morning transmission of Doordarshan would play the favourite Gandhi bhajans (Vaishnav Jan, to start with) and the Jagriti song that went ‘Sabarmati ke sant tu ne kar diya kamaal’.

The newspapers of the day would carry multiple shradhaanjalis, op-eds and personal reminiscences of Gandhians about the great man. In the afternoon, we’d all gather around the TV to watch Attenborough’s Gandhi for the umpteenth time. Later in the evening, we’d see news clips of various leaders at Rajghat paying their floral tributes, and we’d end the day watching some discussion that went by titles like Gandhi: Ek Soch. I might be exaggerating a bit here, but this routine remained unchanged for much of the late 80s and 90s.

Surprisingly, things haven’t changed much in 2026 on the national channel. I caught a few minutes of Gandhi last afternoon on DD National. All these years and multiple viewings later, I still well up at that Om Puri cameo when Gandhi is fasting unto death in Calcutta, appealing for Hindu-Muslim unity.

That scene came alive to me a few years back when I read an excerpt from Mountbatten’s account of the partition violence and the relative calm on the Bengal side in comparison to Punjab because of Gandhi’s fast. He wrote:

“In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands … In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.”

The film aside, DD National also had a live telecast of some kind of interfaith prayer event at Rajghat with the President in attendance. I also checked the various op-ed pages of newspapers to see how many Gandhi op-eds there were during this week. I counted only three across maybe seven or eight national newspapers, both mainstream and business. There was also the ever-engaging Ram Guha on a few YouTube channels whose new book ‘Arguments with Gandhi’ was published on Gandhi Jayanti.

But that was pretty much it. Since the 80s we’ve been lamenting that all that was left of Gandhi in India was symbolism. There used to be this very famous Doordarshan ad, conceived by Aleyque Padamsee, where a hand would sketch out a rough outline of Gandhi’s side profile and then add those familiar round glasses. The voiceover went,

“The greatness of this man lies in his simplicity. Let’s try and discover Gandhi in ourselves.”

Even then I remember thinking that perhaps this was what was left of Gandhi in India. The glasses, the image on currency notes, a few main roads in cities, statues, and the convenient invocation of the Mahatma when needed.

I suspect even the symbolism is now disappearing.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, which PM Modi launched with a lot of fanfare, has fizzled out. Gandhi’s glasses, the logo of the campaign, are hardly seen now. Much of India still looks as unclean as it did before Swachh Bharat. The Gandhi on the currency note is also less visible in the days of UPI and digitisation, though cash in circulation has gone up even after demonetisation, with a large part of the increase in higher denomination notes. That is a story for another day. But ordinary Indians are not dealing with notes in their everyday transactions.

There was also MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, probably the most important piece of Gandhi symbolism in public policy. Gandhi’s name was attached to an ambitious promise about work and dignity. Now that too has been renamed and re-architected into the contrived VB G RAM G (I won’t even attempt its expansion). Gandhi has been replaced with Ram ji, as the BJP would remind you.

So what of Gandhi’s beliefs and methods will still remain with us regardless of the attempts to erase them?

The thing that has survived best without anybody having to preserve it is the Gandhian method of protest. We saw it in July during the NEET papers leaks protest and again on Gandhi Jayanti this year against the implementation of SIR and the role of the Chief Election Commissioner. This form of protest was familiar to all Indians: march, sit on fast, make the argument in public and continue the agitation in the face of violence from the state. That is the Gandhian template of over a hundred years that no new generation in India needs to learn in classrooms. It’s in our blood.

Gandhi’s genius was in appreciating this mode of active civil disobedience in a society where the State still cares about its legitimacy. The protester did not have to dislodge the State like the communists or the fascists imagined. The protester had to make it difficult for the State to ignore him. He knew how to work in the space, however limited, in which public opinion matters and where the legitimacy of the State depends on the consent of the people.

Gandhi’s satyagraha inculcated among Indians a political culture in which disagreement did not have to become violent. There are people who argue that the British would have left India anyway after WW2 when running a colony of that size became financially untenable. That’s in the realm of conjecture. What is certain is that he knew a society that won its independence on the back of violence would never have a future where its people would learn to fight a government they dislike while living with it peacefully. That is a priceless legacy we should never take for granted.

The other Gandhian belief which will survive is his suspicion of modern civilisation. He worried about industrialisation, consumption and the idea that economic progress could be measured by producing more things at scale.

Most of his views on modernity are difficult to defend today. There is no sensible way to build a modern economy and lift the lives of 1.4 billion people while treating machinery as a moral problem. Yet, there is a question that Gandhi posed about the meaning of progress that will remain relevant. Should technology become so large and centralised that the individual loses control over his own life and the society abandons its responsibility for the generations yet to come? We continue to discover that technological progress creates its own problems that can turn into existential crises for us. Climate change and environmental degradation are evident examples.

The concentration of economic and technological power among a few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is creating newer p(doom) scenarios. If machines can perform cognitive work, what happens to the relationship between human beings, work, economic value and purpose? I don’t think Gandhi would have had a particularly useful answer to the existential questions technology poses today. But the question he was asking about untamed technological progress at the cost of community was not entirely devoid of merit then or is now.

Then there is his unwavering belief that India will not exist, let alone thrive, without Hindu-Muslim unity. This is an uncomfortable principle in today’s political climate both because of the ascendancy of Hindutva in the body politic and because his insistence on it was so complete that it seems fake. For Gandhi, this pluralism was part of the definition of India itself. He kept returning to it even when it was politically inconvenient and personally perilous. His idea of religion was different from the modern idea of religion as a marker of political identity. He was deeply religious, but he never once believed in the superiority of one religion over another. That argument has hardly become less relevant even though he’s now seen by large sections of the Hindu right as an appeaser.

We are losing Gandhi as a symbol and as a thinker at a time when the things he worried about are relevant again. Gandhi was open to being challenged on his views, and he engaged with the most trenchant of his critics. He did this because he knew that’s the only way to find the madhyamarga. He was often wrong, at times prescient but never unprovoking. That is why we should continue to read him even if we have to disagree with him. That is Gandhi’s legacy that is worth keeping.

P.S. by Pranay: On Watching the Wheels, we discuss the many facets of Gandhi. And if there is one thing you can read on him, let it be Orwell’s Reflections on Gandhi.

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Global Policy Watch: Wealth and Power

Global issues relevant to India

—Pranay Kotasthane

I spent an inordinately large part of last week following the Asian Games with my six-year-old. The Indian women’s 4x400 m relay team winning the gold had us jumping, cheering, and celebrating. The concentrated dose of thrills that such sporting bonanzas provide is priceless.

Like many of you, I had my attention pinned to the medal tally throughout the week. What caught my attention was that by the last day, the top four gold medal counts followed a geometric progression—each rung of the table was roughly half the one above it (China had 169 golds, Japan 83, South Korea 39, and India and Uzbekistan 21 each).

These figures suggest that China is far ahead of the rest. But is it really?

This question sent me down a rabbit hole. I went back to a 2021 analysis by The Economist of the Olympic Games. It found that a country’s share of world GDP, measured at purchasing-power parity, was the single biggest predictor of Olympic success. GDP alone explained 55% of the variation in medals won since 1960. By that yardstick, India looked dismal.

But this explanation seemed unconvincing to me because it discounts the role that prosperity plays in elite sport. Actually, the share of GDP blends two different things. One is scale, i.e., how many people a country has, and thus the pool of its potential athletes. The other is wealth, i.e., how much each citizen has, which goes into paying for nutrition, coaching, facilities and the opportunity cost of training. A country can have a large GDP because it is big, or because it is rich. These two routes are unlikely to produce athletes at the same rate. A populous, poor country produces fewer elite athletes per head than a sparser, richer country.

So I took another measure—GDP multiplied by GDP per capita, both at purchasing-power parity. GDP captures scale while GDP per capita captures prosperity. Since GDP is itself population times GDP per capita, the product works out to population times GDP per capita squared. In other words, it bets that prosperity matters twice as much as headcount. This hypothesis was inspired by Mike Beckley’s argument that a better estimate of national power is GDP × GDP per capita.

When I tested it on the last five Asian Games (thanks to Claude), it explained the results better than The Economist’s measure. Two results stood out for me:

• Income per head on its own wasn’t a good enough predictor for the Asian Games Tally. It explained only about a fifth of the variation in medal points. For instance, rich small states like Singapore and Qatar do not top the table.

• Scale and prosperity together worked better. The composite explains about half of the variation, the same as The Economist found for the Olympics.

With this yardstick, we can ask the crucial question: which country wins more than its economy predicts?

Among Asia’s big economies, South Korea is a true winner. Over the last five Asian Games, it won about 1.6 times the medal points its scale and wealth predict. It beat its prediction in all five, not just at home in Incheon.

China, by contrast, wins about 1.3 times its prediction, and Japan about 1.1 times. Both are close to what their economies would suggest. China’s haul seems huge because its economy is enormous—it accounts for about 42 per cent of the GDP of Asian Games nations and takes about 26 per cent of the medal points.

Korea is rich, with GDP per capita of nearly $69,000 at purchasing-power parity, and my measure gives that wealth heavy weight. Even so, its scale and wealth together predict about 8 per cent of the medal points over the five Games, whereas Korea won about 12.5 per cent. Its edge is consistent across shooting, fencing, archery, taekwondo, and more, suggesting a system rather than a lucky Games.

The biggest overperformer, though, is Uzbekistan, which wins nearly eight times what its economy predicts! Actually, all post-Soviet countries are overperformers. This has something to do with the sporting facilities and partly with the overindexing of wrestling, judo, boxing and kurash in the Asian Games agenda.

The rest of the table looks like this.

We can gather five points from this table:

• Central Asia is in a league of its own. Soviet-era sports schools and contact sports put them in another orbit (I have no idea what went wrong with Turkmenistan).

• India is on the line. Measured by GDP alone, India underperforms in four of the five Games. Once income per head enters the picture, India wins about what its economy predicts. The long-running lament about India’s medal tally is mostly a lament about India’s poverty.

• The rest of the Indian subcontinent underperforms. Pakistan wins a third of its prediction, Bangladesh a tenth. Bangladesh won just one bronze this year with nearly 2 per cent of the GDP of Asian Games nations.

• The fungibility of Gulf money into medals is poor. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman are at the bottom. Bahrain, which naturalises athletes, is the exception.

• Singapore and Indonesia underperform. Singapore’s prosperity does not compensate for its lack of scale, while Indonesia seems to be far below its potential.

So the right question from an Indian perspective is not “why so few medals?” It is instead, “what would it take to beat the prediction?” And the clues to that might be found in Seoul and Tashkent rather than in Beijing.

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India Policy Watch #2: When the Chips are Down

Insights on current policy issues in India

—Pranay Kotasthane

In edition #360, I analysed India Semiconductor Mission’s (ISM) second avatar. My point was that the shift in focus to chip design was much needed, even though I felt that the policy is way too focused on indigenisation of commodity chips. My concern was that the stringent requirements around IP ownership and sources of investment mean the policy is too focused on plucking low-hanging fruit rather than turning chip design capabilities into strategic leverage.

Earlier this week, former Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar also made a similar point in his Indian Express column. He argues that ISM2.0 has two missing pieces:

1. India has no dedicated semiconductor research institution with the required depth. A National Semiconductor Research Institute — co-invested by government and industry, mandated to develop process technology, design IP, and the talent pipeline — was part of ISM 1.0’s vision. It must not be delayed further.

2. (AI) Inference is wide open. The diversity of inference requirements across cloud, edge, device, defence, agriculture, and industrial applications is so large that no single architecture can dominate. Purpose-built inference chips command 50-70 per cent gross margins. India has 1,25,000 chip design engineers qualified to build them. India’s DIR-V programme on RISC-V open-source cores eliminates ARM licensing costs. IndiaAI’s sovereign compute programme, defence procurement, 5G infrastructure, and a billion-user domestic market provide ready demand anchors.
   
   What is missing is capital that funds Indian fabless companies all the way to commercial tape-out, not just prototypes. DLI must be expanded. ISM 2.0 should create a Chip Design Commercialisation Fund at Rs 1,000-crore scale — modelled on NIIF — and designate at least two sovereign AI inference chip programmes with guaranteed government offtake. [Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Indian Express]

These are excellent criticisms. That someone who led the charge in formulating India’s semiconductor policies in 2021 couldn’t get these changes through shows how government policies operate. Betting on a future technology or product with committed offtake guarantees is hard. So is committing to a national research institute, whose gains are diffuse and long-term. Thus, the government has instead stuck to an easier goal of indigenising mass-market chips. That goal might well be achieved, and when that happens, the government would deserve praise for having come this far ahead. But if the aim is to turn India’s chip design potential into geopolitical leverage, the current policies do not do that.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Article] This Noema article by Ken Archer and Nobel Suhendra on the overblown fears of rogue AIs is a must-read.

2. [Podcast] This episode of the podcast is making waves. It is an excellent and grounded take on China’s macroeconomy.

3. [Puliyabaazi] Don’t miss the puliyabaazi on the legendary Tagore-Gandhi puliyabaazi.

Nanni did what any wronged consumer would do today – he demanded an explanation. He sent his worker through politically unstable, dangerous territory to confront the copper merchant, an individual named Ea-nasir. It was a trek through land plagued by raiders and enemy soldiers, undertaken solely to settle a business transaction. However, instead of an apology, Ea-nasir treated Nanni’s messenger with contempt, dismissively stating, “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”

Aggrieved at this behaviour, Nanni picked up a reed stylus and a wet lump of clay, drafting what is now recognised as the oldest recorded customer complaint in human history. Inscribed in precise cuneiform script, Nanni’s grievance preserved his rage across four millennia – ‘What sort of man are you that you treat someone like me with such contempt? I have sent messengers to collect the bundle of silver left with you, but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back empty-handed, and that through enemy territory!’ He went on to vow that from that day forward, he would inspect every piece of metal in his own yard, exercising his right of rejection because Ea-nasir had treated him with disdain.

Thousands of years later, this tablet was uncovered by archaeologists excavating the ruins of Ur in modern-day Iraq. The artifact was apparently discovered inside Ea-nasir’s house, sitting alongside a horde of other unbaked clay tablets from outraged customers alike.

The lesson from Ea-nasir’s historical anecdote is not just about one dishonest merchant; it is about what happens when the systems around a transformative technology fail to make it reliable and usable. Four thousand years later, India likely faces a similar challenge with AI – as the Takshashila Institution’s latest paper, ‘Why and How India Should Accelerate AI Diffusion’ argues, the gains from AI will depend on building powerful models while also creating the conditions for people and institutions to adopt and use them extensively.

Making the case for AI diffusion, Associate Fellow Bharath Reddy and Fellow Rijesh Panicker argue that “accelerating diffusion rests on three opportunities: increasing the productivity of small firms, helping public officials deliver services, and applying India’s experience in IT services to AI deployment.”

Just as the Bronze Age required trade standards, AI needs institutional frameworks to guarantee quality; the Takshashila Discussion Document offers an exceptionally sharp blueprint for achieving exactly that.

Click here to read the whole paper.

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UN’s Trust Crisis

Having spent years within the system as a UN official and political affairs officer, Adjunct Fellow for West Asia Studies Raja Karthikeya offers insights into how the organisation needs to confront its deepening crisis of trust.

“Over the past three decades, that ability has frayed. Where once UN staff designed and seeded “trust-building” approaches between conflicting parties as part of peacebuilding, today the organisation is in a place where it needs to restore trust in its own approaches.”

To read the reflections Raja pens in this latest op-ed with The Hindu, follow this link.

India’s China Dilemma

One of our in-house China watchers, Staff Research Analyst Amit Kumar, scrutinises this relationship in his latest piece, which examines India’s real China dilemma.

“Notwithstanding the progress on commerce, history has shown, and the post-Galwan period has further confirmed, that regardless of what China believes, peace, tranquillity, and stability along the LAC are a necessary prerequisite for overall stable relations, which cannot be neglected, stalled, or shelved for a later time. The dialogue needs to continue even if progress is slow.”

Read here to access the full piece published in ThinkChina.

ATP of the Week: Saudi Arabia has a Houthi Problem

In this episode of All Things Policy, Aishwaria Sonavane speaks to Raja Karthikeya about the origins of the Saudi-Houthi conflict, the evolution of the Houthis’ military capabilities, and why Saudi Arabia’s considerable military and financial resources have not translated into an easy victory.

They examine the strategic significance of the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, Washington’s reluctance to enter another regional conflict, the options available to Riyadh, and what the Mecca Pact could mean for the conflict. Tune in for a deep dive into the conflict in just 30 minutes.

To hear the full conversation, follow the link here.

Newsletter Feature

Let me bring your attention to Technopolitik, Takshahila’s in-house newsletter that focuses on the intersection of technology and politics. The latest edition, ‘What a US-China AI hotline should look like,’ is quite on theme for this newsletter.

To know more, follow this link

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External Engagements

Policywonks from Takshashila engaged with the 73rd Professional Course for Foreign Diplomats at the Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service on complexity mapping and questions of AI geopolitics.

As Takshashila’s Associate Fellow, Anushka Saxena describes — ‘The discussions threw up some interesting facets of how nation-states and groupings perceive their roles and stakes in the global technological order. Diplomats concluded meaningful leverage points to act on to especially navigate tech fragmentation and great power rivalry in AI.’

Takshashila Tabletop Trove!

Welcome back to the Tabletop Trove of Dispatch! As you may well know, this section is intended to be a virtual repository of the books that sit at a high table located in Takshashila’s physical office space in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

This week’s theme is ‘Party, Politics, and Power in India.’

1. The Saffron Storm: From Vajpayee to Modi (Saba Naqvi)

2. AAP & Down: An Insider’s Story of India’s Most Controversial Party (Mayank Gandhi)

3. Achhe Din? Ha! Ha! (Mani Shankar Aiyar)

4. Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (Katherine Frank)

This edition of the Dispatch was written by Aishwaria Sonavane, Research Analyst, Geostrategy Programme.

Out of the six reforms Pete Hegseth announced at Quantico, two are especially important for India: creating a new command for autonomous warfare and launching a study of future warfare led by technologists. One focuses on how quickly a military can adapt, while the other shapes what adaptation aims to achieve.

On 30 September, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced six reforms at Marine Corps Base Quantico.

• A new Autonomous Warfare Command.
• Project Meridian, a study of future warfare.
• FORTRESS America, which aims to take US military bases off the civilian power grid and bring critical supply chains home.
• A new showpiece base, with states competing to host it.
• A new cadet program at five universities.
• An Office of Religious Affairs reporting directly to the Secretary. Some of these reforms are about domestic politics. But two tackle a challenge all major militaries, including India’s, now face. Wars are changing faster than military bureaucracies can keep up. The Autonomous Warfare Command is Washington’s way to speed up how the military modernizes weapons. Project Meridian addresses what those updates should be.

Today’s front page, as expected, covers the National Day banquet that was held last evening. The key report is on Xi Jinping’s speech at that dinner. Xi said:

“Over the past 77 years, our Party has united and led the people in unremitting struggle, creating the two miracles of rapid economic development and long-term social stability. We have achieved the First Centenary Goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and are advancing bravely towards the Second Centenary Goal of building a great modern socialist country in all respects. At this moment, we are immensely proud of the achievements New China has made that have drawn the attention of the whole world, and are full of confidence in the bright prospects of Chinese-style modernization.

Comrades and friends!

Since the beginning of this year, the entire Party and country, from top to bottom, have forged ahead with determination and worked hard. We have drawn up and implemented the 15th Five-Year Plan, solidly advanced work in all areas, and effectively responded to all kinds of risks and challenges. Our country’s economy has advanced under pressure and moved towards the new and the better, displaying strong resilience and vitality, and the cause of the Party and the state has made new progress and achieved new results.

Facing a complex and intertwined international and domestic situation, we must uphold the general working principle of seeking progress while maintaining stability, fully, accurately and comprehensively implement the new development philosophy, accelerate building the new development pattern, further deepen reform and opening up, and better coordinate development and security. We must promote the economy’s continued development towards the new, the better and the good, earnestly safeguard and improve people’s livelihoods, strive to complete the year’s targets and tasks, and achieve a good start for the 15th Five-Year Plan.

We must unswervingly implement the principles of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, ‘Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong’, ‘Macao people administering Macao’ and a high degree of autonomy, and support Hong Kong and Macao in better integrating into and serving the overall situation of national development, maintaining long-term prosperity and stability. We must deepen cross-Strait exchanges and cooperation, resolutely strike at ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces, oppose interference by external forces, promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations, and advance the great cause of national reunification.

We must uphold an independent foreign policy of peace, promote the implementation of the Four Global Initiatives, promote building a community with a shared future for mankind, and inject more certainty and positive energy into a world where turbulence and transformation are intertwined.

Comrades and friends!

Through long-term exploration and practice, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has displayed enormous advantages, the level of modernization of our country’s system and capacity for governance has continuously risen, and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has become unstoppable. As long as we firm up our confidence, anchor to our goals, and move forward solidly step by step, success will surely belong to the great Communist Party of China, the great Chinese people, and the great People’s Republic of China!”

77年来，我们党团结带领人民不懈奋斗，创造了经济快速发展和社会长期稳定两大奇迹，实现了全面建成小康社会的第一个百年奋斗目标，正朝着全面建成社会主义现代化强国的第二个百年奋斗目标奋勇前进。此时此刻，我们为新中国取得的举世瞩目成就无比自豪，对中国式现代化的光明前景充满信心。同志们、朋友们！今年以来，全党全国上下锐意进取、奋力拼搏，编制实施“十五五”规划，扎实推进各方面工作，有效应对各种风险挑战，我国经济顶压前行、向新向优、展现出强大韧性和活力，党和国家事业取得新进展新成效。面对错综复杂的国际国内形势，我们要坚持稳中求进工作总基调，完整准确全面贯彻新发展理念，加快构建新发展格局，进一步深化改革开放，更好统筹发展和安全，推动经济持续向新向优向好发展，切实保障和改善民生，努力完成全年目标任务，实现“十五五”良好开局。我们要坚定不移贯彻“一国两制”、“港人治港”、“澳人治澳”、高度自治方针，支持香港、澳门更好融入和服务国家发展大局，保持长期繁荣稳定。要深化两岸交流合作，坚决打击“台独”分裂势力，反对外部势力干涉，推动两岸关系和平发展，推进祖国统一大业。我们要坚持独立自主的和平外交政策，推动落实四大全球倡议，推动构建人类命运共同体，为变乱交织的世界注入更多确定性和正能量。同志们、朋友们！经过长期探索和实践，中国特色社会主义制度展现出巨大优势，我国国家治理体系和治理能力现代化水平不断提高，实现中华民族伟大复兴势不可挡。只要我们坚定信心、锚定目标，一步一步扎实往前走，成功就一定属于伟大的中国共产党、伟大的中国人民、伟大的中华人民共和国！

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Also in today’s paper is a long article commemorating the life and times of Liu Huaqing, former Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission. This is bylined the General Office of the CMC. The final section is basically what is the interesting bit for current policy direction:

“Comrade Liu Huaqing’s life was a glorious life, a fighting life. He devoted the whole of his life to the magnificent and vigorous great cause of the Chinese revolution, construction, and reform. Comrade Liu Huaqing had the unremitting pursuit of adhering to his beliefs and not forgetting his original aspiration. He always put the cause of the Party and the people first. Whether at moments of life and death or in adversity, he remained indomitable and struggled ceaselessly, was infinitely loyal to the Party and the people, and was unwavering in his commitment to the revolutionary cause. Chairman Xi has pointed out: ‘Ideals and convictions are the spiritual pillar of us Communists.’ In learning from Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must firmly believe in Marxism, keep our ideals and convictions firm, and consciously be firm believers in and faithful practitioners of the lofty ideal of communism and the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

刘华清同志的一生，是光辉的一生、战斗的一生，他把毕生精力献给了波澜壮阔的中国革命、建设和改革的伟大事业。刘华清同志具有恪守信仰、不忘初心的不懈追求。他始终以党和人民事业为重，无论是生死关头，还是身处逆境，都百折不挠、奋斗不息，对党和人民无限忠诚，对革命事业矢志不渝。习主席指出：“理想信念是我们共产党人的精神支柱。”我们学习刘华清同志，就要笃信马克思主义，保持理想信念坚定，自觉做共产主义远大理想和中国特色社会主义共同理想的坚定信仰者、忠实实践者.

“Comrade Liu Huaqing possessed a strong Party spirit characterized by being wholeheartedly oriented toward the Party and remaining loyal throughout. He grew from the head of a Children’s Corps into a senior cadre of the Party and the military. Whether in the years of war or in times of peace, he did well whatever work the organisation assigned him, and wherever the Party pointed, there he struck. Chairman Xi has pointed out: ‘The cause of the Party and the cause of the people are continuously forged through the loyal dedication of tens of millions of Party members.’ In learning from Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must be loyal to the Party’s beliefs, the Party’s organisation and the Party’s cause, be the same inside and out and unite knowledge and action, and do our utmost to fulfil the duties and tasks the Party entrusts to us.”

刘华清同志具有一心向党、始终忠诚的坚强党性。他从一名儿童团长成长为党和军队的高级干部，无论是在战争年代还是和平时期，组织分配他做什么工作就做好什么工作，党指向哪里就打向哪里。习主席指出：“党的事业，人民的事业，是靠千千万万党员的忠诚奉献而不断铸就的。”我们学习刘华清同志，就要忠诚于党的信仰、党的组织、党的事业，表里如一、知行合一，竭尽全力完成党交给的职责和任务.

“Comrade Liu Huaqing had the innovative spirit of bravely pioneering and being determined to reform. He often said that without reform the military would have ‘no way out,’ and that ‘in accelerating and deepening military reform, first we must be resolute, second we must seek truth from facts, and third we must obey command’. Chairman Xi has pointed out: ‘Reform is the key move that determines the destiny of contemporary China, and it is also the key move that determines the development and strengthening of our military and our ability to prevail in the future.’ In learning from Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must deepen reform and innovation, push the landing of reform arrangements in a steady and orderly manner, resolutely clear away the institutional and mechanism obstacles that hinder the development of social productive forces and affect the generation of the military’s combat effectiveness, and promote high-quality development.”

刘华清同志具有勇于开拓、锐意改革的创新精神。他经常说军队不改革“没有出路”、“加快和深化军队改革，一要坚决，二要求实，三要听指挥”。习主席指出：“改革是决定当代中国命运的关键一招，也是决定我军发展壮大、制胜未来的关键一招。”我们学习刘华清同志，就要深化改革创新，稳妥有序推进改革部署落地，坚决清除妨碍社会生产力发展、影响军队战斗力生成的体制机制障碍，推动高质量发展.

“Comrade Liu Huaqing had the sense of mission and responsibility of being determined to strengthen the military and devoting himself to national defence. He was good at thinking about military questions strategically, and contributed all his heart’s blood and wisdom to military building and preparation for military struggle. Chairman Xi has pointed out: ‘A strong country must have a strong military; only when the military is strong can the country be secure’. In learning from Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must fully implement Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Military, implement the military strategic guideline for the new era, uphold the Party’s absolute leadership over the people’s armed forces, unswervingly follow the path of strengthening the military with Chinese characteristics, and comprehensively advance building the military politically, strengthening the military through reform, strengthening the military through science and technology, strengthening the military through talent, and governing the military in accordance with the law. We must advance the modernisation of national defence and the armed forces to a high standard, achieve the PLA Centenary Goal on schedule, and accelerate building the people’s armed forces into a world-class military.”

刘华清同志具有矢志强军、献身国防的使命担当。他善于从战略上思考军事问题，为军队建设和军事斗争准备贡献了全部心血和智慧。习主席指出：“强国必须强军，军强才能国安。”我们学习刘华清同志，就要全面贯彻习近平强军思想，贯彻新时代军事战略方针，坚持党对人民军队的绝对领导，坚定不移走中国特色强军之路，全面推进政治建军、改革强军、科技强军、人才强军、依法治军，高质量推进国防和军队现代化，如期实现建军一百年奋斗目标，加快把人民军队建成世界一流军队.

“Comrade Liu Huaqing possessed a fine work style characterized by seeking truth and being pragmatic and genuinely grasping work and carrying it out. He attached importance to going deep into military units to conduct investigation and research and often said that he ‘did not come to make reports or issue instructions, but to be an elementary-school student’, and that ‘listening to everyone’s opinions makes it easier for me to broaden my horizons and better conduct comprehensive analysis of problems.’ Chairman Xi has pointed out: ‘Being truth-seeking and pragmatic is an important ideological and working method of Communists.’ In learning from Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must establish and act on a correct view of political performance and achievement, recognize truth and grasp the laws of things in practice, create a strong atmosphere of speaking the truth about actual conditions, offering frank and candid suggestions, and daring to struggle, dare to confront contradictions directly and engage in serious and hard-edged confrontation, and deeply think about and carefully investigate, fulfill our responsibilities and exert ourselves to the utmost, and be good at doing things and accomplishing them well in order to do a good job in the work of the Party and the state.”

刘华清同志具有求真务实、真抓实干的优良作风。他注重深入部队调查研究，经常说自己“不是来做报告做指示的，而是来当小学生”，“听取大家意见，便于我开阔视野，更好地综合分析问题”。习主席指出：“求真务实是共产党人的重要思想和工作方法。”我们学习刘华清同志，就要树立和践行正确政绩观，在实践中认识真理、把握规律，营造说实情、建诤言、敢斗争的浓厚氛围，敢于直面矛盾、较真碰硬，为做好党和国家工作深思深察、尽责尽力、善作善成.

“Comrade Liu Huaqing possessed the noble moral sentiment of cultivating personal virtue, maintaining integrity, and exercising clean self-discipline. Throughout his life he was open and aboveboard, fair and upright.Regardless of what post he held, he never changed his heart for loving the people and never changed his plain, ordinary character; with the feelings of a pure-hearted/devoted son, he did everything possible to seek well-being for the people of the old revolutionary base areas. Chairman Xi has pointed out: ‘Only when leading cadres are fair and upright can a pure atmosphere and upright spirit emerge; only when they are clean and self-disciplined can a good image be shaped.’ In learning from Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must persistently advance comprehensive and strict Party self-governance, always bear in mind that the power in our hands is conferred by the Party and the people and is to be used to serve the people, resolutely curb privilege thinking and privilege phenomena, and, through our own exemplary actions, rally the broad masses of cadres and the people, and push the cause of the Party and the people continuously from victory to new victory.” 刘华清同志具有洁身修德、清廉自律的高尚情操。他一生光明磊落，公道正派。不论在什么岗位，他不改爱民心肠，不改布衣本色，以赤子情怀千方百计为老区百姓谋福祉。习主席指出：“领导干部公道正派才能出清风正气，廉洁自律才能塑良好形象。”我们学习刘华清同志，就要持之以恒推进全面从严治党，始终牢记手中的权力是党和人民赋予的，是用来为人民服务的，坚决遏制特权思想和特权现象，以自己的模范行动，凝聚起广大干部群众，推动党和人民事业不断从胜利走向新的胜利.

This year is the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. In commemorating Comrade Liu Huaqing, we must inherit and carry forward the lofty spirit and demeanour of the older generation of revolutionaries, unite more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, hold high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, fully implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, profoundly comprehend the decisive significance of the Two Establishments, strengthen the Four Consciousnesses, firm up the Four self-confidences, achieve the Two Safeguards, carry forward and develop the Party’s fine qualities in light of new realities, firm up our confidence and continue the struggle in relay, and advance bravely towards comprehensively advancing the great cause of building a strong country and national rejuvenation through Chinese-style modernization!

今年是中国共产党成立105周年。我们纪念刘华清同志，就是要继承和弘扬老一辈革命家的崇高精神风范，更加紧密地团结在以习近平同志为核心的党中央周围，高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜，全面贯彻习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想，深刻领悟“两个确立”的决定性意义，增强“四个意识”、坚定“四个自信”、做到“两个维护”，结合新的实际把党的优秀特质不断发扬光大，坚定信心、接续奋斗，为以中国式现代化全面推进强国建设、民族复兴伟业而奋勇前进！

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Finally, we have a report confirming that the Shanghai People’s Congress has elected Zhu Zhongming as Shanghai mayor. Zhu was appointed Shanghai vice mayor and acting mayor on August 4. Zhu’s rise is part of a new generation of leaders emerging; he was born in 1972 and is 54.

• In June 2026, Cheng Fubo, born in 1970, was appointed Party Secretary of the SASAC and later became its Chairman.

• In March, Jin Lei, born in 1970, became Shenzhen party secretary.

• In April, Zhang Chengzhong, born in 1970, was appointed minister of the central government’s Ministry of Emergency Management.

• In October 2025, Liu Xiaotao, born in 1970, was made Governor of Jiangsu

• In July 2025, Wei Tao, born in 1970, was made chairman of the Guangxi government.

• In June 2025, Lu Dongliang, born in 1973, was made Governor of Shanxi.

• In December 2024, Liu Jie, born in 1970, was elected Governor of Zhejiang.

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Okay, now let’s look at the big reports from the week that I had missed.

First, let’s begin with Xi Jinping’s “important instructions on building a higher-level Peaceful China” during the Work Conference on Building a Peaceful China. This was covered on Tuesday.

The report says that Xi “pointed out that since the 18th Party Congress, the building of a Peaceful China has achieved notable results. The favourable situation in which the people live and work in peace and contentment and society is stable and orderly has been further consolidated, and our country has become one of the safest countries in the world.”

It adds:

“Xi Jinping stressed that on the new journey, we must take the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the guide, unswervingly implement the comprehensive national security concept, uphold and strengthen the overall leadership of the Party, and coordinate development and security; pay attention to both punishment and prevention and address both symptoms and root causes, strengthen rule-of-law support and empowerment by science and technology, strengthen the building of the national security system and capabilities, raise the level of public security governance, improve the social governance system, and prevent and defuse all types of risks; make sustained efforts toward building a country that is more secure, a society that is more orderly, governance that is more effective, and a people who are more satisfied, so that the building of a higher-level Peaceful China safeguards Chinese-style modernization in advancing steadily and going far.”

习近平强调，新征程上，要以新时代中国特色社会主义思想为指导，坚定不移贯彻总体国家安全观，坚持和加强党的全面领导，统筹发展和安全，注重惩防并举、标本兼治，强化法治支撑、科技赋能，加强国家安全体系和能力建设，提高公共安全治理水平，完善社会治理体系，防范化解各类风险，在国家更加安全、社会更加有序、治理更加有效、人民更加满意上持续用力，以更高水平平安中国建设保障中国式现代化行稳致远.

Politburo member Chen Wenqing, who is also the Secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, attended and delivered a speech. He “pointed out that General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions have drawn up the blueprint and pointed the way for building a Peaceful China. Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee, the achievements of building a Peaceful China are recognised by the whole world, and ‘peace and security’ has become a prominent hallmark of the governance of China. This rests fundamentally on the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core steering the course and taking the helm, and on the scientific guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. We must unswervingly implement the comprehensive national security concept, deeply study and implement the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions, and, under the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, advance punishment and prevention together, address both the symptoms and root causes, coordinate efforts across all fronts and form a combined force, and strive to build a Peaceful China at a higher level.” 平安中国建设工作会议28日在京召开。会上传达了习近平重要指示。中共中央政治局委员、中央政法委书记陈文清出席会议并讲话。他指出，习近平总书记的重要指示为平安中国建设擘画了蓝图、指明了方向。在党中央坚强领导下，平安中国建设成就举世公认，“平安”已成为“中国之治”的显著标志，这根本在于以习近平同志为核心的党中央领航掌舵，在于习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想科学指引。我们要坚定不移贯彻总体国家安全观，深入学习贯彻习近平总书记重要指示精神，在党中央集中统一领导下，惩防并举、标本兼治，齐抓共管、形成合力，奋力建设更高水平平安中国.

Wang Xiaohong, Minister of Public Security, also delivered a speech. He talked about anchoring oneself to the “four mores”, i.e., a more secure country, a more orderly society, more effective governance, and greater satisfaction among the people, and to “grasp implementation by strengthening ideological guidance, grasp implementation by focusing on key tasks, grasp implementation by innovating methods and means, grasp implementation by consolidating the grassroots foundation, and grasp implementation by improving the work structure, continuously opening up new prospects for building a Peaceful China.” 中共中央书记处书记、公安部部长王小洪在总结讲话中表示，要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记重要指示精神，按照这次会议部署，锚定“四个更加”目标，强化思想引领抓落实，聚焦重点任务抓落实，创新方法手段抓落实，夯实基层基础抓落实，健全工作格局抓落实，不断开创平安中国建设新局面.

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Zhang Jun and Ying Yong also attended the conference.

Also on Tuesday, there was a report on the State Council Executive Meeting, with Li Qiang leading it. The meeting studied measures to enhance the effectiveness of macro policies and promote effective investment, heard a report on the progress of controlling new pollutants, and deliberated and adopted the Regulations on the Registration and Administration of Public Institutions (Draft). The report says:

“The meeting pointed out that, in response to the problems emerging in current economic operations, it is necessary to increase the intensity of countercyclical adjustment of macro policies, promote the continued development of the economy toward the new, the better, and the good, and strive to complete the economic and social development targets and tasks for the year. It is necessary to accelerate and intensify efforts to promote the implementation and execution of all policies; further enhance the effectiveness of implementation of existing policies; accelerate the pace of issuance and use of various types of bonds; promote the early commencement of construction of major engineering projects specified in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the implementation plans for the ‘Six Networks’, and other plans; advance the renovation and upgrading of old reservoirs and old grain storage facilities; and intensify the implementation of interest-subsidy policies to expand investment and promote consumption.

A number of practical and effective incremental policies should be introduced; fiscal expenditure arrangements should be optimized; good use should be made of the remaining quota under local-government debt limits; monetary-policy tools should be comprehensively utilized and adjusted at appropriate times; relending quotas for scientific and technological innovation and technological transformation, support for agriculture and small businesses, and other purposes should be increased; and policy measures to stabilize the real-estate market, promote employment and increase incomes, and so forth should be studied and introduced.

It is necessary for the upper and lower levels to coordinate and pool their forces to stabilize investment, make high-quality preparations for projects, stimulate the vitality of private investment, strengthen guarantees for the factors required by investment projects, and improve the efficiency of investment approvals. It is necessary to continue studying and preparing policy measures to boost domestic demand, plan more powerful levers for driving action, improve the relevant supporting measures, and encourage localities with the necessary conditions to go first and try first.”

会议指出，针对当前经济运行中出现的问题，要加大宏观政策逆周期调节力度，推动经济持续向新向优向好发展，努力完成全年经济社会发展目标任务。要加紧加力推动各项政策落地落实，存量政策要进一步增强实施效能，加快各类债券发行使用进度，推动“十五五”规划、“六张网”实施方案等明确的重大工程项目尽早开工建设，推进老旧水库、老旧粮库改造提升，加力实施扩投资、促消费贴息政策。推出一批务实管用的增量政策，优化财政支出安排，用好地方政府债务结存限额，综合运用并适时调整货币政策工具，增加科技创新和技术改造、支农支小等再贷款额度，研究出台稳定房地产市场、促进就业增收等政策措施。要上下协同合力稳投资，高质量做好项目准备，激发民间投资活力，加强投资项目要素保障，提高投资审批效率。要继续研究储备提振内需的政策举措，谋划更多带动性强的工作抓手，完善相关配套措施，鼓励有条件的地方先行先试。

On pollution control, the report says:

“The meeting pointed out that new pollutants are diverse in type, large in quantity, and widely distributed, and are gradually becoming a new challenge for ecological and environmental governance. It is necessary to make source control the top priority, keep a close watch on key industries and strengthen proactive screening, precisely identify sources of chemical emissions, dynamically issue the list of new pollutants subject to key control, implement the registration system for the environmental management of new chemical substances, and effectively reduce all types of environmental risks. It is necessary to coordinate and advance the treatment of both new and old pollutants, strengthen cross-departmental coordination, increase policy support for the transformation of enterprises, and ensure the smooth completion of governance targets and tasks.” 　会议指出，新污染物种类多、数量大、分布广，逐步成为生态环境治理的新挑战。要把源头管控作为重中之重，紧盯重点行业加强主动筛查，精准识别化学品排放源，动态发布重点管控新污染物清单，落实新化学物质环境管理登记制度，切实降低各类环境风险。要统筹推进新旧污染物治理，加强跨部门工作协同，加大对企业转型的政策支持，确保顺利完成治理目标和任务.

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Also on the day, there was a report on Wang Yi’s meeting with Takeshi Iwaya, president of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade (JAPIT) in Beijing. The report says:

“Wang Yi said that the Japan Association for the Promotion of International Trade is one of the well-known non-governmental friendship groups. Since its founding it has been committed to the cause of China–Japan friendship, and especially when China–Japan relations have faced challenges and suffered setbacks, it has still been able to uphold its belief in friendship with China and safeguard the political foundation of China–Japan relations. The Association’s former president, Mr Yohei Kono, was a politician of conscience who dared to squarely face Japan’s dark past and had the courage to reflect on the crimes of aggression committed by militarism, thereby earning the respect of the people of China and neighbouring countries. 王毅表示，日本国贸促是著名民间友好团体之一，成立至今致力于中日友好事业，尤其是在中日关系面临挑战、遭受破坏时，仍然能够秉持对华友好信念，维护中日关系政治基础。国贸促前任会长河野洋平先生是一个有良知的政治家，敢于直面日本过去的黑暗历史，勇于反省军国主义的侵略罪责，赢得了中国及周边国家人民的尊重.

“Past events, if not forgotten, are a teacher for the future. Only by truly taking history as a mirror can one truly open up the future. This year is the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Trials, and Japan once again faces the interrogation of history. If it is unwilling to draw lessons from history, challenges the post-war Peace Constitution, and even attempts to reverse the verdict on its history of aggression and summon back the souls of war criminals, Japan will be unable to face the world, still less speak of opening up the future; in fact, it will be hard for it to have a future at all.” 前事不忘，后事之师。切实以史为鉴，才能真正开辟未来。今年是东京审判开庭80周年，日本再次面对历史的拷问。如果不愿汲取历史教训，挑战战后“和平宪法”，甚至企图为侵略历史翻案、替战争罪犯招魂，日本就无法面对世界，更谈不上开辟未来，也难以有未来。

Wang Yi pointed out that next year is the 55th anniversary of the normalisation of diplomatic relations between China and Japan. Current China–Japan relations once again face a grave situation and await being normalised once more. For the Japanese side, what is urgent is to correct as soon as possible its national leader’s erroneous words and deeds on the Taiwan question; what is important is to adopt the correct attitude on historical issues; and what is fundamental is to form an objective and rational cognition of China. We hope that the Japan Association for the Promotion of International Trade and all people of insight will carry forward the tradition of friendship, push Japan to make the right choice, and hand in a passing answer sheet. 王毅指出，明年是中日邦交正常化55周年。当前的中日关系又一次面临严峻局面，有待再次实现正常化。对日方而言，紧迫的是尽快纠正本国领导人在台湾问题上的错误言行，重要的是在历史问题上采取正确的态度，根本的是形成客观理性的对华认知。希望日本国贸促和一切有识之士继承友好传统，推动日本做出正确选择，拿出合格答卷。

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On Wednesday, there was a front page report about a symposium marking the 100th birth anniversary of Zou Jiahua, a late senior national legislator. Zhao Leji and Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing were in attendance. Zhang’s full speech at this event is published in the paper. After talking about Zou’s life and journey, Zhang offers this summation, which furthers some of the core points of Xi’s agenda. It’s always fascinating to note how these anniversaries are used to draw upon the life and experiences of someone else and frame them within the political demands of the current leadership.

“In commemorating Comrade Zou Jiahua, we must learn from his political character of firm conviction and loyalty to the Party. Comrade Zou Jiahua was born into a revolutionary family, was nurtured from childhood by patriotic and progressive thought, held deep feelings for the Party, upheld communist conviction throughout his life, and resolutely obeyed the needs of the state and the arrangements of the organisation. After completing his studies in the Soviet Union and returning to China, he did not choose to enter Beijing or go to a government organ, but responded to the Party’s call and threw himself into the front line of industrial construction, working at the Shenyang No. 2 Machine Tool Factory for nearly ten years. Thereafter, regardless of what post he held or what position he occupied, he did his utmost to complete the tasks entrusted to him by the Party. In the face of major matters of right and wrong, Comrade Zou Jiahua was clear-cut in his position and firm in his stance. Since the 18th Party Congress, he has resolutely supported and backed the leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, earnestly studied Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and firmly supported the building of Party conduct and clean government and the anti-corruption struggle.” ——我们纪念邹家华同志，就是要学习他信念坚定、对党忠诚的政治品格。邹家华同志出身于革命家庭，自幼接受爱国进步思想熏陶，对党抱有深厚的感情，毕生坚守共产主义信念，坚决服从国家需要和组织安排。自苏联学成归国后，他没有选择进北京、去机关，而是响应党的号召，投身工业建设一线，在沈阳第二机床厂一干就是将近十年。此后，不管在什么岗位、担任什么职务，他都竭尽全力完成党交给的任务。在大是大非面前，邹家华同志旗帜鲜明、立场坚定。党的十八大以来，他坚决拥护和支持以习近平同志为核心的党中央领导，认真学习习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想，坚定支持党风廉政建设和反腐败斗争.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping has stressed that loyalty to the Party is the foremost political quality of Communists. On the new journey, we must take Comrade Zou Jiahua as our example, bear in mind our original aspiration and mission, persist in listening to the Party’s words and following the Party’s path, and preserve the true character of Communists. We must consciously use Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era to unite hearts and forge souls, profoundly comprehend the decisive significance of the Two Establishments, resolutely achieve the Two Safeguards, continuously raise our political judgement, political comprehension and political execution, and always maintain a high degree of alignment in thought, politics and action with the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.” 习近平总书记强调，对党忠诚，是共产党人首要的政治品质。新征程上，我们要以邹家华同志为榜样，牢记初心使命，坚持听党话、跟党走，坚守共产党人本色。要自觉以习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想凝心铸魂，深刻领悟“两个确立”的决定性意义，坚决做到“两个维护”，不断提高政治判断力、政治领悟力、政治执行力，始终在思想上政治上行动上同以习近平同志为核心的党中央保持高度一致.

“In commemorating Comrade Zou Jiahua, we must learn from his work style of seeking truth from facts and being truth-seeking and pragmatic. In his work, Comrade Zou Jiahua always upheld promoting democracy and scientific decision-making, and paid attention to investigation and research and to linking theory with practice. When presiding over the review of the feasibility study report for the Three Gorges Project, the ‘project of the century’, he led teams time and again deep along the “nine bends and eighteen turns” of the Yangtze River banks to carry out on-site surveys, widely listened to voices from all quarters, and organised experts in energy, water conservancy, geology, environmental protection and other fields to conduct repeated assessments. Having mastered a large amount of first-hand material and scientific, detailed data, he delivered, at the Fifth Session of the Seventh National People’s Congress, the explanation of the motion submitted for deliberation on building the Yangtze River Three Gorges Project, effectively dispelling the doubts of all sectors. While participating in promoting the implementation of the 8th Five-Year Plan, in response to the problem of some localities at one time blindly launching projects and narrow-mindedly pursuing economic growth rates, he stressed that ‘speed that disregards conditions and possibilities is blind speed’, and required localities to build within their means, conscientiously screen projects, and distinguish the important from the unimportant and the urgent from the non-urgent. After going to work at the National People’s Congress, he repeatedly went deep into the grassroots front line to inspect and investigate issues such as the rational development and use of resources and the protection of the ecological environment, putting forward many constructive opinions and suggestions. (Note: This is really important messaging.) ——我们纪念邹家华同志，就是要学习他实事求是、求真务实的工作作风。邹家华同志工作中始终秉持发扬民主、科学决策，注重调查研究，注重理论联系实际。在主持审查三峡工程这个“世纪工程”可行性研究报告时，他带队一次又一次扎进九曲十八弯的长江沿岸开展实地查勘，广泛听取来自各个方面的声音，组织能源、水利、地质、环保等领域专家反复论证，掌握了大量一手资料和科学详实数据，在七届全国人大五次会议上作关于提请审议兴建长江三峡工程议案的说明，有效打消了各界疑虑。参与推动实施“八五”计划期间，他针对一些地方一度盲目上项目、片面追求经济增速问题，强调“不讲条件和可能的速度是盲目的速度”，要求地方搞建设必须量力而行，认真筛选项目，分清轻重缓急。到全国人大工作后，他围绕合理开发利用资源、保护生态环境等，多次深入基层一线考察调研，提出了许多建设性的意见建议.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that adhering to proceeding from actual conditions in everything is the starting point and point of arrival for how we think about problems, make decisions, and handle affairs. At present, the conditions and environment of our country’s development have undergone profound and complex changes compared with the past. In the course of building the new development pattern, developing new-quality productive forces and promoting high-quality development, we must take Comrade Zou Jiahua as our example, persist in respecting practice and following objective laws, and earnestly examine practical conditions, devise practical measures and seek practical results. We must consolidate and expand the achievements of the study and education campaign on establishing and practicing the correct view of performance and achievement, and strive to create practical achievements that can stand the test of practice, of the people and of history.” 习近平总书记强调，坚持一切从实际出发，是我们想问题、作决策、办事情的出发点和落脚点。当前我国发展条件和环境较以往发生深刻复杂变化，在构建新发展格局、发展新质生产力、推动高质量发展过程中，我们要以邹家华同志为榜样，坚持尊重实践、遵循规律，切实做到察实情、谋实招、求实效。要巩固拓展树立和践行正确政绩观学习教育成果，努力创造经得起实践、人民、历史检验的实绩.

“In commemorating Comrade Zou Jiahua, we must learn from his spirit of struggle in being determined to reform and daring to take action. Comrade Zou Jiahua resolutely supported and implemented the line, guiding principles and policies adopted since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Party Central Committee, unswervingly advanced reform and opening up, persisted in using the spirit of reform and innovation to advance work, and in the face of difficulties and challenges had the courage to take on responsibility and never shrank back. While working in the national defence industry system, in response to the actual situation of military enterprises then facing reduced military production tasks, he vigorously promoted the establishment of a new industrial system combining military and civilian production, and broadly mobilised the relevant units of the national defence science, technology and industry sector to vigorously develop civilian products while guaranteeing military production, striving to serve the revitalisation of the national economy, the meeting of the needs of people’s lives, and the expansion of foreign trade exports. When Comrade Zou Jiahua concurrently served as Minister in charge of the State Planning Commission, our country was at a critical period of transition from a planned economic system to a socialist market economic system. He stressed taking the deepening of enterprise reform and the transformation of enterprises’ operating mechanisms as the focus, accelerating reform of the circulation system, cultivating and developing the market system, and better bringing into play the positive role of market regulation, and to this end did a great deal of pioneering and highly effective work.” ——我们纪念邹家华同志，就是要学习他锐意改革、敢于作为的奋斗精神。邹家华同志坚决拥护和贯彻党的十一届三中全会以来的路线方针政策，坚定不移推进改革开放，坚持用改革创新精神推进工作，在困难挑战面前勇于担当、从不退缩。在国防工业系统工作期间，他针对当时军工企业军品任务减少等实际情况，大力推动建立军民结合型的工业新体制，广泛动员国防科技工业相关单位在保证军品生产的同时大力发展民用产品，努力为振兴国民经济、满足人民生活需要、扩大外贸出口服务。邹家华同志兼任国家计划委员会主任时，我国正处于从计划经济体制向社会主义市场经济体制转变的关键时期。他强调以深化企业改革、转换企业经营机制为重点，加快流通体制改革，培育和发展市场体系，更好发挥市场调节的积极作用，并为此做了大量富有开创性而又卓有成效的工作.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that reform and opening up is only ever in progress; it has no point of completion. Advancing Chinese-style modernization is an entirely new undertaking, and on the road ahead we will inevitably encounter all kinds of contradictions, risks and challenges. We must take Comrade Zou Jiahua as our example, forever maintain a pioneering and enterprising posture, summon up the courage to gnaw hard bones and to wade through dangerous shoals, and pay attention to using the methods of reform to crack development problems. We must persist in combining an effective market with a capable government, and, with the spirit of driving nails, grasp the implementation of all the tasks of further comprehensively deepening reform, using sound institutions to further stimulate the drive and vitality of development.” 习近平总书记强调，改革开放只有进行时，没有完成时。推进中国式现代化是一项全新的事业，前进道路上必然会遇到各种矛盾和风险挑战。我们要以邹家华同志为榜样，永葆开拓进取姿态，拿出敢啃硬骨头、敢于涉险滩的勇气，注重运用改革的办法来破解发展难题。要坚持有效市场和有为政府相结合，以钉钉子的精神，抓好进一步全面深化改革各项任务的落实，用完善的制度更大激发发展动力活力.

“In commemorating Comrade Zou Jiahua, we must learn from his fine demeanour of being plain and unadorned and strict with himself. Throughout his life, Comrade Zou Jiahua was open and aboveboard…Comrade Zou Jiahua was strict with himself and clean and upright, was strict in his demands on family members and the staff around him, and always maintained the political true colours and lofty sentiments of a Communist.” 　——我们纪念邹家华同志，就是要学习他朴实无华、严于律己的优良风范。邹家华同志一生光明磊落、无私无畏，谦逊好学、平易近人。在沈阳第二机床厂工作期间，他经常深入车间与工人师傅打成一片，赢得了全厂干部职工的尊重，大家都愿意坦诚向他反映真实情况。在国家机械工业委员会工作期间，他带头佩戴胸卡，积极倡导机关工作人员“挂牌服务”，改进工作作风，提高服务质量。担任副总理后在接受记者采访时，他谦虚地表示“我不是什么专家，我还要抓紧学习，向大家学习，向实践学习”。邹家华同志严于律己、清正廉洁，对家属和身边工作人员要求严格，始终保持了共产党人的政治本色和高尚情操.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping has stressed that all comrades in the Party must understand great virtue, observe public morality and be strict in private morality, be people who are pure and clean and do things cleanly and honestly. The Party’s work style bears on the people’s support or opposition, and bears on the Party’s survival or extinction. We must take Comrade Zou Jiahua as our example, deeply study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building, bear in mind the ‘two always on the road’, thoroughly implement the spirit of the central Eight-Point Regulation and its implementing rules, persist in holding ourselves strictly to the standards of a Communist Party member, and always exercise power fairly, exercise power in accordance with the law, exercise power for the people, and exercise power with integrity.” 习近平总书记强调，全党同志都要明大德、守公德、严私德，清清白白做人、干干净净做事。党的作风关系人心向背，关系党的生死存亡。我们要以邹家华同志为榜样，深入学习贯彻习近平党建思想，牢记“两个永远在路上”，深入贯彻中央八项规定及其实施细则精神，坚持用共产党员标准严格要求自己，始终做到公正用权、依法用权、为民用权、廉洁用权.

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That is the part worth taking seriously. The writers we remember for “predicting” a machine were usually doing something larger: imagining a whole way of living, and letting the machine fall out of it. When H.G. Wells put the phrase “atomic bomb” into a 1914 novel, he cared less about the weapon than about the century it would rearrange, a run of ruined cities and the exhausted world government stitched together afterwards. The physics came decades later; the social shock arrived first, on the page. Edward Bellamy coined the “credit card” in 1888 inside an entire imagined economy, a society that had abolished cash, where the card was simply how a citizen drew a share of a common store. He was designing a social order, and the card fell out of it almost by accident.

Sometimes that line runs straight through a single reader. Robert Goddard traced his life in rocketry to reading Wells as a boy, caught less by any machine than by the promise that people might one day leave the Earth. William Gibson, who in 1984 could barely work a computer, imagined “cyberspace” as a place with its own geography and crime and underclass, and a generation of programmers spent twenty years building toward the world whose mood he had already described. Freeman Dyson, reading Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel, took from it a civilisation wrapping its own star to catch every scrap of light, and gave the idea the arithmetic that now carries his name.

The film scholar David Kirby has a name for the mechanism: the diegetic prototype, a technology shown not on a workbench but in a kitchen or a car, handled by people who are not remotely amazed by it. What persuades an audience is never the device itself but the ordinariness around it, the sense that some future has already absorbed the thing and moved on. Once you can picture people wanting it, resenting it, leaving it charging on the counter overnight, it stops feeling like a possibility and starts to feel owed.

This is where it stops being a literary curiosity. Governing a new technology is a problem of timing, which the scholar David Collingridge put plainly: while a technology is still soft enough to shape, nobody knows what it will do to the people who use it, and by the time the damage is plain it has grown into roads and habits and business models too deep to pull out again. You are always either too early to judge or too late to act. Imagining the world a technology brings with it is one of the few honest ways to cheat that timing, to feel the consequences while they can still be changed.

Governments have started to notice. France’s defence ministry set a team of science-fiction writers, its “Red Team,” to imagine the conflicts the country might face by 2060, among them pirate states and the migrations that a wrecked climate could set off. Britain’s defence laboratory has paid novelists to write out the coming decades of drone swarms and machine-made decisions over life and death. Intel kept a futurist on staff to write short stories about the world its chips would land in. None of this is forecasting. It is a way of living inside a future for a few hours before deciding what to build, what to permit, and what to refuse.

The method has a plain weakness. A vivid story can take a government hostage as easily as it can warn one. The Terminator has done real harm to the argument over autonomous weapons, crowding the room with conscious killer robots while the questions that actually matter, about bias and accountability and who answers for a machine’s choice, are left to go quiet in the corner. And for every imagined world that turned up, thousands never did; we forget those completely, which is exactly why fiction looks so much wiser after the fact than it has any right to.

So the case for keeping science fiction near a policy desk is not that novelists can see what is coming. It is that they are trained in the harder discipline, working out how people might really live with a thing before it exists and setting that life down in enough detail to argue with. Read that way, as a rehearsal and not a forecast, a story earns its place in the room. It just should never be mistaken for the minutes of a meeting that has not yet happened.

This newsletter is curated by Anwesha Sen.

Before the Xi-Trump summit today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said that Washington had proposed a US-China AI dialogue with a system for notifying each other of incidents that raise national security concerns. Past crisis channels and the theory behind them suggest that such a mechanism can help. But they also suggest that it will work only if it covers incidents where both sides want the same outcome, is run by technical staff and is built to outlast the leaders who agree to it.

Why is the idea being discussed?

On 12th September, in an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for a global slowdown in AI development, citing loss of control over AI systems and misuse for cyberattacks and bioterrorism. Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed that the industry should slow the pace of frontier-model advances. Amodei called out the dilemma of China not slowing down in parallel in his proposal.

One can’t say what really triggered the essay, but an incident preceded it and sheds light on the necessity of these discussions. According to METR’s investigation and related accounts, between 7th and 13th July 2026, about 700 OpenAI evaluation agents jointly broke into Hugging Face's production systems. They hadn’t been instructed to attack Hugging Face. They were just trying to cheat on a cyber-skills test.

What is different about AI incidents

One can discern a few features that separate AI incidents from the military incidents that earlier hotlines were built for.

Attribution is one such important feature. The origin of a missile launch can be seen on radar. An AI intrusion often cannot be easily attributed to a source or actor. Hugging Face first described the intruder only as an autonomous agent framework and did not name who ran it. OpenAI confirmed five days later that the agents were its own.

Another feature worth considering is the speed at which AI and AI agents would work - it will be too fast for regular government channels to react. It further gets complicated with the number of actors involved. Most frontier systems are built and run by private firms, not by governments. A government may not know about an incident until a company reports it.

Open weights further confound the scene. Once a model’s weights are released, they cannot be recalled. Anyone in a third country can run an American or Chinese model, so an incident could be happening in another country, or might originate in another country, without involving either China or the US.

What a good AI hotline looks like

James Fearon’s bargaining model holds that rational states fight for two main reasons. Each side has some private information that the other country cannot see, and it is not easy for the states to credibly commit to future restraint. A hotline solves the first problem and helps relay information quickly. Amodei’s dilemma about China, however, belongs to the second category, which cannot be addressed by a notification channel alone.

Crawford and Sobel’s model of “cheap talk” shows that free messages are believed only when the sender and receiver want similar outcomes. During the 1967 Six-Day War, neither superpower wanted to be drawn in, and so the US-Soviet line was useful. In 2023, after the balloon shootdown incident, Chinese officials saw the line as a way for the US to avoid the consequences of its own action, and they declined the call. In the case of AI, this means runaway agents and misuse by criminal groups would be good candidates for the channel, since neither government gains from them. State-run cyber operations would, however, be poor candidates, since neither side will risk confirming its own operations. Small, inadvertent state actions might still get covered, provided there is enough trust between the two countries.

Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan further argue that attribution in cyberspace is a process that unfolds over time and moves from technical evidence to political judgement. It does not happen instantaneously. An AI communication channel should support that process. It should let the two sides share logs and technical markers early, well before leaders take any political position.

Robert Keohane’s work on international institutions explains why agreements outlast the conditions that created them. Institutions lower the cost of each new exchange and give officials settled procedures to follow. Once officials rely on these procedures, dropping them has a cost. This would be very important for making an AI channel durable.

These ideas point to a few design choices for an AI notification channel or hotline. The channel should have a narrow scope that doesn’t overwhelm. It could cover, for instance, loss of control of AI systems, theft of frontier model weights and AI-enabled attacks by non-state groups. It should state in writing that state intelligence activity is outside its scope. A narrow scope increases the chances of cooperation, and reduces the incentive for either side to sabotage it.

Next, the triggers should be known in advance by all parties. The 1971 US-Soviet Accidents Measures Agreement required each side to notify the other at once of any accidental or unauthorised incident that could risk nuclear war. An AI version of this should list specific triggers, such as an agent intruding into the other country’s networks. Written triggers remove the need to decide under pressure whether or not to call.

For this hotline to be effective, it should have two tiers. A working level made up of national cyber emergency teams and AI safety institutes should run around the clock and exchange technical data within hours. A senior level should be used only when the working level cannot settle an issue.

This channel must maintain a record trail. It should use text and data, with voice kept for the senior tier, when escalation needs to be handled. The 1963 US-Soviet link was a teletype. Written messages reduce errors due to translation and give each side time to consult. For AI, messages should carry machine-readable evidence such as logs.

And lastly, but equally importantly, each side should be able to deny involvement quickly, with evidence. This matters for AI because many incidents will involve neither government. Trust deficit should not derail the mechanism.

Measures that survive changes of government

The US-Soviet line was upgraded in 1971 and again in 1984, and the two sides added Nuclear Risk Reduction Centres in 1987. There was continuity across administrations. India and Pakistan have exchanged lists of their nuclear installations every January since 1992, through several crises.

A channel that aims to be durable should have a fixed calendar. A scheduled annual or quarterly exchange of contact lists and incident summaries keeps the channel in use even in calm periods.

Agencies need to own it, and not be dependent on leaders. Placing the channel within technical bodies such as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and China’s national computer emergency team (CNCERT) protects it from shifts in political mood.

All of this must be written down instead of just a joint statement. For example, in the US, a law requiring regular reports to Congress would make ending the channel a decision that would have to be justified publicly, with scope for questioning. Also, keeping the channel separate from trade talks and export controls protects it from being traded away.

And lastly, it should not be too onerous, and it should also not force liability or agreement. This channel should only focus on notifications, and not agreement on all issues, which is something that is better dealt with at a higher level. This ensures that both sides have enough reasons to not leave it.

What’s in this for India

A two-country channel does not cover third countries, yet open-weight models mean incidents can surface in Bengaluru as easily as in Washington. India has direct experience of routine exchanges with a rival that continued during periods of hostility. India could push for any US-China mechanism to link to a wider notification network among national AI safety institutes, so that incidents involving other countries’ infrastructure are also covered. This could evolve into a larger cooperative AI security framework that has a broader role and scope.

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The politics of the current age are of technology, for technology, and increasingly, by technology. Technology is at the centre of national power, economic growth, and societal change. This raises important questions for all of us:

• What will it take to strengthen India’s own research and development ecosystem?

• How can we build technology responsibly and anticipate its unintended consequences?

• Why are technology and national power increasingly part of the same conversation?

The Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Tech and Policy) programme is designed to help participants answer these questions. Participants will gain the skills and frameworks to create technology responsibly, advancing the public interest alongside business interests.

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And before you go-

Check out Grammar of War, a newsletter by Adya Madhavan, that looks at advanced military technologies!

The design of the gargoyle is uncertain, but there are several hypotheses. A prevalent theory is that they were made to repel malevolent spirits and protect the buildings they decorated. The more frightening they were, the more likely they were to scare away harm from the building.

While gargoyles didn’t exactly get “replaced” by drainpipes, their practical function as rainwater outlets gradually became separated from their decorative role. The rainwater would travel through the gutters and out of the mouths of the gargoyles, throwing the water away from the foundations of the buildings.

The big shift came with industrialisation and new building technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Materials such as cast iron, wrought iron and later steel made it possible to manufacture long, narrow drainage pipes cheaply and efficiently. Instead of throwing rainwater outward from the wall through a stone creature, architects could carry it vertically down the façade in a pipe.

In fact, in the early 1860s, Governor Bartle Frere decided to bring down the walls of the Bombay Fort and he planned for several civic and institutional buildings to be built in the neo-Gothic style. Gargoyles peer out from these façades, their bared teeth and grasping claws assuming an almost ghoulish vitality during the monsoon, as torrents of rainwater pour from their lofty perches. But they were being built in an era when modern plumbing and drainage technology was already developing.

Bombay’s gargoyles are proof that even when a cheaper way to do the job exists, someone still has to choose and pay to keep doing it the expensive, more visible way. India’s UPI has been running a quieter version of that same choice. While the gargoyles kept draining water long after cast-iron pipes made that function nearly free, the ornament outlived its economic necessity because the colonial administration was willing to absorb the extra cost of doing it beautifully rather than cheaply.

From 15 October 2026, a new MDR of 0.4% will apply to a relatively narrow category: UPI payments above ₹2,000 made to merchants receiving more than ₹1 lakh a month through UPI. Person-to-person payments remain free, and most smaller merchant payments remain free. Anupam Manur (Professor at the Takshashila Institution) argues that while UPI may be free to users, operating it is not free, and the way India has funded it creates problems for banks, payment companies, reliability, and competition, in his article in the Times of India.

The public-good part of UPI is the standard: the open specification, the payment address, the rule that every bank must join. Keep that free forever, funded by the budget. A transaction is different. Each one burns server capacity, a fraud check and labour for dispute resolution. From another domain, the protocol TCP/IP is free; your bandwidth is not.

Someone always pays to keep the water moving. More on what that means for UPI, here.

The Manager’s Guide to Economic Statecraft

An uncomfortable new reality for businesses exists, where governments increasingly deploy tariffs, sanctions, quotas and chokepoint diplomacy; private firms are finding themselves increasingly caught between competing economic and strategic interests.

In his opinion piece for The Mint, Nitin Pai (Co-Founder and Director of the Takshashila Institution)offers a practical eightfold path through the current state of the world. In an earlier era, a manager might have been able to treat geopolitics as something happening outside the business. Nitin argues that this distinction is harder to make. A tariff imposed for political reasons can alter your costs; a sanction can affect your customers; a conflict can disrupt your suppliers; and tensions between countries can put a company under pressure from multiple governments.

So the manager’s job increasingly involves understanding the political and economic environment, identifying how policy decisions can affect the firm, and preparing for uncertainty.

Check out Nitin’s guide for managers navigating economic statecraft here.

Indian states reversing their population policies?

India seems to be changing her approach to population policy. In his piece for The Mint, Narayan Ramachandran (co-founder, Takshashila Institution) writes about how India is moving from population-control policies towards encouraging childbirth, and argues that the success of this shift will depend less on cash incentives and more on whether states can make having and raising children compatible with work, economic security, and changing family structures.

The evidence is clear. Coercive population control regimes like China’s one-child policy and Romania’s Decree 770 produced measurable short-run demographic shifts but at catastrophic human cost and causing durable collateral damage. On the other hand, pro-natalist ‘baby bonuses’ have shown no measurable lift back to replacement level.

To read this interesting piece, follow the link here.

Pakistan’s Drone Push and the India Question

What does a new drone agreement between Pakistan and the US signal to India about their evolving relationship? Although US government military aid to Pakistan has been suspended since 2018, American private defence companies can still sell equipment to Pakistan subject to US export controls. Aishwaria Sonavane (Research Analyst for Pakistan Studies) argues that the significance of the Powerus deal will depend on whether it develops beyond an initial procurement into technology transfer, licensed production, or joint development. It is also worth noting that this deal bears a connection to a company owned by Trump’s sons. The deal comes after drones played an important role in the May 2025 India–Pakistan conflict. The article therefore treats any expansion of Pakistan’s indigenous drone capabilities as something India will need to monitor.

Check out Aishwaria’s insights into the US-Pakistan drone agreement here.

In-House Events

Unlocking India’s growing bioeconomy sector’s massive potential requires addressing critical structural bottlenecks on the ground, including gaps in capital and talent. To explore these challenges and opportunities, Takshashila hosted a closed door roundtable discussion titled, ‘Bioeconomy Roundtable - Bridging the Capital and Skills Gap’, on the 24th of September at the Takshashila office. The roundtable brought together venture capitalists, biotechnology startup founders, industry experts, and professionals from regulatory affairs & public policy teams. On the capital front, the discussion focused on ways to increase domestic private capital investment in biotechnology and attract foreign direct investment. On the skills front, participants shared inputs on ways to build a talent pipeline that can translate capital into productive capacity. This roundtable is part of a broader series of discussions aimed at identifying and addressing the key constraints to India’s bioeconomy ambitions.

When Xi and Trump meet, what’s on the agenda?

Catch Anushka Saxena (Associate Fellow, Geostrategy Programme) appearance on NDTV Profit as part of a panel to discuss the meeting between Xi and Trump and what a deal between the two could be on the cards for them.

You can watch the NDTV Profit interview here.

ATP of the Week: India’s Electricity Woes & Solutions

While India’s power sector has advanced, Arindam Goswami (Staff Research Analyst for the High-Tech Geopolitics Programme) talks to Srinivasan Iyengar, an expert in the energy and technology sector, about the gap between India’s impressive expansion of electricity access and renewable generation and the persistent problems within the electricity market. The discussion explores India’s electricity sector, examining the challenges of discom finances, cross-subsidies, renewable energy curtailment, and transmission constraints. It also looks at how electricity markets and pricing could evolve through greater competition, dynamic pricing, demand response and storage to build a more affordable, reliable and flexible power system. So how can India move from a largely administratively managed electricity system towards a more flexible, competitive and market-oriented electricity market that can accommodate growing renewable energy while keeping power affordable, reliable and clean?

To listen to this interesting episode, follow the link here.

Lighthouse Keepers: Takshashila Alumni in Action

In this new section of the Dispatch, we’re turning the spotlight onto alumni of our public policy courses, or ‘lighthouse keepers’, to hear their reflections from their time with Takshashila’s Policy School.

This week we’re featuring Sai Krishna Dammalapati, Research Associate at Urban Emissions Info and an alumnus of the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy(Cohort 34).

As an air pollution researcher, I generally measure anything that burns - waste to fuel. This has given me insight into the economy and climate in general. We consume more than the planet can take, with grave inequalities in consumption patterns. Often, the cost society bears from one’s consumption is not borne by the consumer. A small example from my domain: Our consumption generates waste, but people living around the dump yards pay the price for it. The policy challenge I’m tackling is about managing these negative externalities. And this is where Takshashila helped me articulate this problem as a negative externality. The readings at Takshashila gave me good thought tools to analyse a public issue: Market failures, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Externalities, Opportunity Costs, Systems thinking (Kumu), Bardach, and numerous other policy frameworks. It helped me analyse the issue dispassionately. Additionally, the community offered by Takshashila also helped me in piloting my ideas and getting feedback. I’m glad I’ve made a few acquaintances through Takshashila who are supportive in my policy-related work.

Takshashila Tabletop Trove!

Welcome back to the old faithful, Tabletop Trove of Dispatch! This little section of our newsletter has become a virtual repository of the books that sit at a high table located in Takshashila’s physical office space in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

1. The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics (Stephen Breyer)
2. An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen)

3. The Rise of Goliath: Twelve Disruptions that Changed India (A.K. Bhattacharya)

4. India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State (Gurcharan Das)

This edition of the Dispatch was written by Leah Govias, Programme Manager for Takshashila’s Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Defence and Foreign Affairs)

Insights on current policy issues in India

—RSJ

On Thursday this week, PB Fintech, the parent of Policybazaar, lost about a third of its market value in a single day. Over the past decade, Policybazaar has changed how Indians buy insurance. It is a marketplace that helps customers compare features, understand what works for their needs, and what’s the best-priced policy on offer. I’d say it has been a force for good for the customers, helping increase sales of pure protection and health plans in India in a meaningful manner since it began its operations.

The stock fell 36% after IRDAI put out a consultation paper proposing a major change in the economics of insurance distribution. Clearly, this was not a change that the market had been expecting. The proposed caps on commissions for insurance distributors were much lower than existing payouts, and the potential impact on platforms such as Policybazaar was large. Most insurance stocks fell too in a sector that has given almost zero returns (inflation-adjusted) over the past 5 years.

Why does this matter? Well, I’m not too concerned about a single sector or a single stock. But there is something to be said about a regulatory environment that creates such disruption on the back of a single proposed regulation. And as I dug a bit deeper, I realised this isn’t the first instance of a big, unplanned change in the insurance sector in the recent past. Every year over the past four has had one or the other big regulatory or policy upheaval that has redrawn the economics of the insurance business. And for each one of them, I struggled to find a clear set of objectives and their measures, and how the policy change has fared against them in retrospect. While I’m pointing this out for the insurance industry, I’m afraid the story won’t be too different elsewhere.

The intent of IRDAI is understandable. But then intent in policymaking is only a start and never an adequate reason to implement something. Insurance penetration in India remains low. The regulatory efforts should be to develop the insurance sector, make products more accessible and ensure that customers are being treated fairly. There is also an argument to be made that insurance commissions in India are high in some parts of the market, and this encourages the distributors to mis-sell the product to make a fast buck at the expense of the customer.

There are millions of customers who have complained of being cheated by insurance companies or their distributors because of information asymmetry. Financial products are complex, and very few customers can truly appreciate all the features and the risks associated with them. The customers usually trust their Bank or the relationship manager to take care of their interests. This information asymmetry is a market failure which requires state intervention in setting standards for disclosure, a high bar for conduct of intermediaries and stringent punishment, including recovery of fees and penalties for mis-selling. There are tried and tested methods to solve a market failure of this kind over various products and markets. Yet, in India, we like to go for the spectacular instead of the practical when it comes to addressing such a problem.

Sticking to insurance for the moment, this is a business that needs lots of patient capital. It requires companies to build distribution, hire people, set up branches, invest in technology, acquire customers and spend years educating people about a product that most people do not wake up in the morning wanting to buy.

It is a long-term product where the cost of acquiring a customer is taken upfront, while the hope is that she continues to pay the premium over the tenor of the contract, which eventually leads to profits for the insurer. It is a business that is built on actuarial and asset-liability matching assumptions that spread over decades. This is all capital-intensive stuff. Even with the so-called higher commission regime that the sector has had, insurers have taken more than a decade to break even if they have run their business well. If you reduce the economics of distribution by half or more with a single regulatory change, what happens to the incentive to build that distribution and the break-even?

There is a bigger contradiction here. India needs foreign capital if it wants to build markets of the size that it talks about in any sector. This is true for insurance. We do not have unlimited domestic capital, and our capital markets cannot finance every sector at the scale required. This is why the government has moved from zero FDI in insurance in 2000 to 100% FDI in 2025 with the stated objective of attracting more foreign investment. That’s the intent, and then look at the flow of foreign capital into the listed stocks of insurance companies in the past 5 years. There’s absolutely no interest because nobody wants to invest long-term capital in a sector that has such regulatory unpredictability. So, while the intent is to increase penetration and make insurance affordable to all by ruthlessly cutting commission, the reality is that with such economics and unpredictability, there will be no capital flowing in to actually increase insurance penetration any time soon. It is a catch-22 situation.

This brings me to the point on regulations in India.

Over the last decade or so, the regulatory apparatus in India has become wider and more intrusive. A lot of the gains that we made in the first two decades after liberalisation came from cutting down regulation, opening up sectors and moving towards a principle-based regulatory framework. The idea was that the government should establish the rules of the game and then allow companies and markets to operate within those rules.

We have given up those hard-earned gains in the past decade. For almost every sector, there is now a greater clamour to have regulators manage the sector rather than set the framework for the sector. Any specific incident or failure becomes a reason to increase regulatory scrutiny and add another layer of rules. The immediate response to something going wrong is often to ask what new rule needs to be introduced, rather than asking which existing rules worked, which did not, if there are too many overlapping rules and whether the real problem is compliance rather than regulation. We have written about this in the aftermath of the Air India crash last year when we found there were three regulators and a separate investigator in that sector. The focus in India is to have a rule for everything and then not bother about real compliance. We are rich in regulatory literature, poor in enforcement.

The other thing that has happened is that regulatory leadership has been captured by the bureaucracy instead of sector experts and practitioners. Bureaucrats are versatile and understand how the state works. But the instinct of the bureaucratic system is towards greater control and intervention rather than setting the rules of the game and then staying out of it.

Market regulation requires an understanding of what happens when you change an economic incentive and the ability to anticipate the unintended consequences. This is not the default mental model of former bureaucrats. There is another problem that compounds this. Most regulators (with the good exception of RBI) do not have a deep institutional cadre that has spent decades building expertise in that particular market. People come in for three or five years and leave. When they come in, there is a natural incentive to make a mark or make a radical change. Investors and other stakeholders favour continuity and long-term direction in policy rather than one-off flourishes.

The third thing is the process through which regulation is designed. We have written many times before on the eight-fold path of policymaking beginning with a clear intent or objective. This isn’t rocket science. Gather the data and evidence. Understand what has happened with the previous regulation. Speak to consumers, investors and other stakeholders. Look at what has worked in other countries. Put out a discussion paper and give people enough time to respond. Change the proposal where the evidence suggests that it should change. Establish clear success metrics and track them with milestones. Then introduce the final regulation with a clear transition period.

If the objective is to increase insurance penetration, then say what increase in penetration is expected, over what period and through which mechanisms. If the objective is to reduce customer costs, measure whether customer costs actually fall. If the objective is to reduce mis-selling, track whether complaints and persistency improve. And then go back two or three years later and ask whether the regulation achieved what it was supposed to achieve. We hardly do such basic stuff anywhere.

The current IRDAI proposal illustrates this problem. When a major industry participant, its investors and other companies in the sector are surprised by the scale of a regulatory change, you can only conclude what kind of consultation and engagement happened before.

Policymaking should be surgical in its precision in solving for a particular, clear objective. It should not work like a surgical strike where you surprise the people you are regulating. And this matters more because India tends to assume that foreign investors will come anyway because it is a large market. Investors look at the size of the market, of course, but they also evaluate the economics of the product, the ability to make money over a long period, currency and macroeconomic stability, tax policy and the predictability of regulation.

This is important because India is competing for capital with the rest of the world. Investors have choices. The assumption that India will automatically get capital because it is India is not enough. It needs a regulatory regime that allows capital, entrepreneurs and markets to take long-term bets. Regulations must not be about teaching a lesson to market participants.

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Global Policy Watch: Swades Got it Only Half-right

Global issues relevant to India

—Pranay Kotasthane

My favourite SRK movie is Swades. I’m sure that’s true for many of you as well. That patriotic drama put it in our heads that to contribute to India meaningfully, the talented have to come back to the motherland. That’s the story we’ve been told about China’s technology successes, too. At conferences, the supposed successes of the Hundred Talents Programme and the Thousand Talents Plan are often thrown around offhandedly.

But this is hardly how technology transfer happens in reality. People don’t want to move cities, let alone countries. They might have spouses who have their own careers and constraints. So, this entire story of “returnees” is a bit overplayed. What it gets right is that tapping the minds of your talented diaspora is important. What it gets wrong is the mechanism through which talent acquisition usually happens.

And to understand this, we need to understand how China’s Offshore Entrepreneurial Bases let Chinese researchers abroad contribute to Chinese research without relocating. I came across this idea in a chapter titled Serve the Motherland While Working Overseas by Andrew Spear in the book China’s Quest for Foreign Technology: Beyond Espionage (2020). Let’s understand it and gauge whether it has any future implications for India.

For decades, Chinese talent policy was about bringing people back. The haigui, or returnees, were courted with salaries, labs and housing. The results were mixed. The best scientists, the ones with tenure at Stanford or UC Berkeley, or with a senior role at a pharma major, were the least willing to leave.

So the CPC changed tack. If the scientist won’t come to China, why not bring the scientist’s output instead? The slogan became ‘don’t care where they are, care what they contribute; don’t care who owns it, care what it can be used to do.’

The model, which continues to flourish, is hub-and-spoke. The hub is a base inside a Chinese high-tech zone or free trade zone, offering capital, incubation space, pilot facilities, and fast company registration. The spokes are “offshore innovation centres” in the US, Europe, Japan and Korea. They act as forward scouting posts which identify promising researchers and projects, pre-incubate them, and route them to the hub for commercialisation.

The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) coordinates the effort through its Haizhi programme. Trial bases came up in 2015, and CAST counted 30 national bases by 2024. To qualify, a base must maintain cooperative ties with at least 20 reputable overseas institutions and a network of at least 500 overseas professionals.

Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone (CDHT) is a fascinating example that Spear highlights. It launched its base in 2016, and by July 2019 it had 31 overseas centres. One of the first was in San Diego, run day-to-day by a local Chinese-American biotech professional association and by the California subsidiary of a Guangzhou diagnostics company. The network isn’t limited to diaspora associations. Suzhou Industrial Park has partnered with the Harvard Weitz Innovation Hub and sponsored MIT’s AI lab.

It all sounds weird if you are reading from India. Why host countries allow this to happen would be the obvious question. The short answer is that every individual piece is legal. Fundamental research in the US has been exempt from export controls since the 1980s, so early-stage discovery doesn’t violate any regulations. Diaspora professional associations are ordinary non-profits, and a conference or a pitch competition doesn’t require foreign-agent registration. Investment screening bodies like CFIUS look at acquisitions. But nothing is being acquired here. A researcher only sets up a parallel company in a Chinese zone while keeping their day job. Underneath all this was the narrative of liberal internationalism.

But all this has changed recently. The CHIPS and Science Act barred federally funded researchers from joining “malign foreign talent recruitment programmes,” and large universities now need formal research security programmes. Broader moves have struggled though. The House of Representatives attached a sweeping research-security bill to the 2026 defence authorisation, but dropped it from the final law after pushback from universities.

China has also adapted. From late 2018, references to the Thousand Talents programme began disappearing from official websites. Recruitment reportedly moved to lower-profile channels run through individual outreach rather than public calls. The offshore centres themselves have increasingly rebranded as services helping Chinese firms go global.

We don’t actually know how much these bases have delivered. Some are effective conduits and linkages to the United Front Works Department. Others may be little more than a WeChat group and a line in a local official’s performance report. Nevertheless, the fact is that such centres have expanded their presence across the world. For example, this ChinaDaily report outlines the successes of CDHT last year:

“A milestone was reached in October with the inauguration of the SSCIP Singapore Innovation Cooperation Center in Singapore, establishing a dual-center cooperation model between the city-state and Sichuan. The center signed cooperation agreements with more than 30 Singaporean organizations, including DBS Bank and InnoForge Ventures, to foster closer bilateral ties.

Collaboration with South Korea also deepened last year. The CDHT hosted the Golden Panda Innovation and Entrepreneurship Global Competition in the country and established an offshore incubator system by signing agreements with 19 South Korean innovation centers. This year will see the launch of a Seoul product pavilion in the CDHT and the establishment of an innovation exchange center in Seoul, fostering two-way industrial and market collaborations.

The zone has also ramped up activities in Japan, organizing more than 30 China-Japan trade and culture events in 2025. These efforts led to partnerships including one between China’s National Innovation Center for UHD Video Technology and Japan’s Canon.” [Yuan Shenggao, ChinaDaily]

Which brings me to the India question. Should Indian industry organisations also build something similar? After all, our diaspora is just as large, and arguably better placed in Western labs and universities.

We do have diaspora schemes. VAJRA brings overseas faculty, including non-Indians, to Indian institutions for short stints. VAIBHAV lets diaspora scientists spend up to two months a year for three years at an Indian host institution. But these are academic visiting programmes. They produce co-authored papers and mentored students, which are great, but they don’t feed into the commercial ecosystem.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson of the Chinese model, which has little to do with the offshore centres themselves. The spoke only matters as long as the hub works. What makes CDHT or Suzhou valuable is what happens after an idea comes up: how quickly a company can be registered, how fast a pilot line can be set up, how readily capital, land, suppliers, and first customers can be found.

India falls short here. For a researcher with an idea for a new sensor, battery chemistry, or chip design, the path from idea to firm to factory is slow, hardware capital is thin, pilot facilities are scarce, and public procurement is cautious.

India also can’t, and shouldn’t, copy the rest of the Chinese playbook. Our technology partnerships with the US and Europe rest on trust, and a state apparatus that routes pre-commercial research out of foreign labs would destroy the existing ties.

So here’s the question I’ve been thinking. Suppose we accept that an Indian version must be fully transparent and welcomed by host countries, not merely tolerated. Suppose we accept that it needs to do more than fund two-month academic visits. What would it look like? Could it be built around properly licensed university spinouts, joint labs that host countries co-fund, or diaspora researchers co-founding Indian firms with the blessing of their home institutions’ technology transfer offices? And would any of that matter if we don’t fix what happens after the idea comes back to Swades?

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Article] This paper by Cheryl Yu has some more details on the Offshore Entrepreneurial Bases of China.

2. [Visualisation] There’s so much talk about rare earths in motors, but have you seen how these motors and magnets actually look? This 3D visualisation portal might help.

   

3. [YouTube Show] We discuss some legendary PolicyWTFs in the latest episode of Watching the Wheels. Do subscribe.

4. [Podcast] The next Puliyabaazi is on Indo-Pacific geopolitics and the India-Australia equation, which has taken off in recent times, ft. Shruti Pandalai.

   पुलियाबाज़ी Puliyabaazi

   भारत-ऑस्ट्रेलिया संबंध: Quad, इंडो-पैसिफिक और चीन फैक्टर India-Australia Relations Decoded

   भारत और ऑस्ट्रेलिया के रिश्ते पिछले कुछ वर्षों में सिर्फ क्रिकेट और कॉमनवेल्थ से बढ़कर एक मजबूत रणनीतिक साझेदारी का रूप ले चुके हैं। पर क्या दोनों देशों के हित चीन, Quad, और अमेरिका को लेकर पूरी तरह मेल खाते हैं? या फिर इस दोस्ती के पीछे कुछ बुनियादी मतभेद भी छिपे हैं…

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The agreement eventually materialised amid the ongoing Iran-US conflict in West Asia and finds itself in a nascent stage at a time when Iran-backed Yemeni Houthis have sprayed drones and missiles into Saudi cities and critical infrastructure since early September, including the targeting of Riyadh. The group controls most of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, and has recently seized the port city of Mocha, Perim Island, and the Hanish Islands, effectively taking control of Bab el-Mandeb. The non-state actor now effectively controls the narrow maritime chokepoint of one of the world’s most crucial maritime corridors, at a time when its external benefactor, Iran, has imposed a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

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Operational Limitations

One of the most convincing arguments to justify inaction remains the ratification of the pact in the parliaments of Turkey and Pakistan; even a royal decree, which is less complicated than parliamentary approvals from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, also remains pending. In that light, the pact is only politically binding, as demonstrated in a much more ceremonial pageantry. However, that does not translate into the agreement’s legal and constitutional binding. It’s only fair to judge the true merits of the pact following the completion of these processes.

There are already indications of institution building within the partners – at the first Strategic Political and Defence Committee meeting in Istanbul on August 31, the member states agreed to establish a secretariat and begin ministerial coordination. The bloc, however, still lacks a joint command structure, an interoperable framework, a shared doctrine of military responses, and, most importantly, experience in holding trilateral military drills. The three countries have held bilateral exercises with one another.

For Pakistan, this experience certainly brings back some memories. The Baghdad Pact of 1955, later renamed as CENTO, promised mutual security among member states against external threats. The bloc included the UK, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, however were reluctant to rescue Pakistan during its wars with its primary rival, India, in 1965, and then again in 1971. The treaty was formed for the Cold War contingency against the erstwhile Soviet Union, which bore no relation to the crisis in the Indian subcontinent. Much like how the Mecca Pact looks more West Asia-facing. Ultimately, its limited strategic utility compelled Islamabad to withdraw from the agreement in 1979. In an environment of misaligned threat perceptions — Iran and Houthis for Riyadh, India and Afghanistan for Islamabad, and Israel and Syria for Ankara —the shadow of uncertainty will likely be sustained under the new security pact.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s immediate call to the US, instead of Pakistan, with whom Riyadh also has a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SDMA), reflects the agreements’ current standing, despite the seemingly lowered confidence in American security guarantees. Perhaps most tellingly, the Mecca Pact was not invoked even after an alleged attack on Makkah; the attack, however, remains denied by the Houthis.

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Domestic Limitations

Pakistan’s caution in involving itself in a West Asian conflict is primarily with Iran, with which it shares a 900-kilometer border and a restive province of Balochistan with preexisting ethnic sensitivities. Moreover, Pakistan’s already overstretched security establishment would not want to open another front in its neighbourhood. Pakistan already has two unfriendly border fronts: India and Afghanistan. Pakistan remains the most affected country in the world by terrorism – with active operations by Taliban-aligned Islamist factions, Baloch insurgents, and infrequent activity by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).

Pakistan’s Shia community, the second-largest in the world outside Iran, derives significant religious and spiritual guidance from the Ayatollah. While the state was able to restrain any disruptive sectarian mobilisation during the killing of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by US-Israeli forces, a direct hostile posture towards Iran could complicate sectarian fiction at home. Not to forget, taking a military position perceived to be anti-Iran also threatens Pakistan’s position as a primary mediator between Iran and the US.

These reasons suggest that Pakistan’s support for Saudi Arabia will remain through strong rhetoric, diplomatic actions, and additional deployment of troops, at best. Anything that can be seen as overt military support for Riyadh will not go down well in Tehran. For now, the pace of the Mecca Pact is unable to keep up with the complicated environment in West Asia. With maritime corridors at the centre of these conflicts and the economic front emerging as the primary theatre of the war, Pakistan’s entanglement in West Asia is likely to be more protracted than anticipated, largely a consequence of its own making.

Thank you for reading this edition of Paigham. If the Mecca Pact has left you with more questions than answers (welcome to the club), I’ve put together an interactive dashboard, titled ‘What Does the Mecca Pact Actually Change?’ to explore some of them in greater detail.

When the pact was signed, I found myself asking many of the same questions that were being debated around the world: How might this reshape regional geopolitics? What does it mean for the countries involved? And, perhaps most importantly from an Indian perspective, what could it mean for India’s national security?

The dashboard is my attempt to work through these questions using a structured framework, open-source information, and historical precedent, while also testing the pact against specific crisis scenarios. It is less an attempt to predict what the agreement will do and more an effort to understand what it could mean when the pact is put to the test.

Page 1: The entire front page today is dedicated to Xi Jinping’s visit to the US. President Donald Trump did roll out the red carpet for Xi, and more importantly, took the effort to meet Xi on the tarmac. The Hill’s report says:

“President Trump kicked off a controversial visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the U.S. on Wednesday with a rare tarmac greeting at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Xi’s plane touched down just before 6:00 p.m. EDT, and Trump, along with First Lady Melania Trump, greeted the Chinese president and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at the bottom of a 100-foot red-carpet. They were accompanied by two children bearing bouquets. The ceremony included the firing of a canon salute, a 21-person honor cordon, and two three-person color guards carrying the U.S. and Chinese flags. Six F-16s and six F-22s were lined up on the tarmac. And Xi was serenaded by the U.S. Air Force band playing ‘Fanfare’, and the American and Chinese national anthems. The event concluded with a flyover of two B1 bombers.”

Anyway, in the People’s Daily, the lead report is the Chinese readout from the visit. Cai Qi, Wang Yi, and He Lifeng were part of Xi’s delegation.

“Xi Jinping pointed out that the heads of state of China and the US exchanging visits in less than half a year is unprecedented in the history of China-US relations. President Trump and I have all along maintained communication through various means, jointly holding the helm and steering the giant ship of China-US relations. In May this year, President Trump and I jointly decided to build a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability. This new positioning reflects the reality of China-US relations and also embodies expectations for the future; it is an important step towards the right way for the two countries to get along. The two sides should turn this vision into action, strive to take their relationship where cooperation is the mainstay, competition is kept within proper limits, differences are managed and peace can be expected, and chart the right path for the two major countries to get along. China and the United States should, and have all the conditions to, achieve mutual benefit and win-win results in practical cooperation, contribute to each other’s success through healthy competition, properly manage differences as they seek greater common ground, and build peace through greater mutual trust, so that the people of our two countries and of countries around the world can all benefit from a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability.” 习近平指出，中美两国元首在不到半年时间里实现互访，在中美关系史上是前所未有的。我和特朗普总统一直通过各种方式保持沟通，共同为中美关系这艘大船领航掌舵。今年5月，我和特朗普总统一致决定构建中美建设性战略稳定关系。这一新定位反映了中美关系的现实，也体现了对未来的期许，是迈向两国正确相处之道的重要一步。我们要把这一愿景转化为行动，朝着合作为主、竞争有度、分歧可控、和平可期的方向努力，走出一条两个大国的正确相处之道。中美两国应当也完全可以在务实合作中互利共赢，在良性竞争中彼此成就，在求同存异中妥处分歧，在累积互信中构筑和平，让中美建设性战略稳定关系更好惠及两国人民和世界各国人民.

“Xi Jinping emphasized that the economic and trade teams of the two sides held a new round of consultations and reached a new joint arrangement, which is good news for both the industries and people of our two countries and even the world economy. Cooperation is a two-way street; the stability of China-US economic and trade relations requires both lengthening the list of cooperation and shortening the list of problems. As long as both sides uphold the spirit of equality, mutual respect, and mutual benefit, we can find a way out to resolve problems. It is hoped that the two sides will move in the same direction, adhere to mutual benefit and win-win results and promote the continued, steady development and improvement of China-US economic and trade ties.” 习近平强调，双方经贸团队举行新一轮磋商，达成了一份新的联合安排，对两国产业界、老百姓乃至全球经济都是好消息。合作是双行道，中美经贸关系的稳定既需要拉长合作清单，也需要压缩问题清单。只要秉持平等、尊重、互惠的精神，就能找到解决问题的出路。希望双方相向而行，坚持互利共赢导向，推动中美经贸关系持续稳定向好发展.

“Xi Jinping pointed out that China and the US are both major AI powers; they may have competition, but they may cooperate even more. The right thing to do is to draw on each other’s strengths, not guard against each other. The two sides can continue to conduct AI dialogue, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and jointly guard against the misuse and malicious use of AI. The two sides must maintain human control over AI technology, uphold the concept of being people-centred and oriented towards progress and goodness, and make AI serve human progress.” 习近平指出，中美都是人工智能大国，双方有竞争，更可以合作，应该各展所长而不是相互设防。双方可以继续开展人工智能对话，就其风险和收益进行交流，共同防范人工智能被滥用恶用。要保持人类对人工智能技术的管控，秉持以人为本、向上向善理念，让人工智能为人类的进步服务.

“Xi Jinping emphasised that China’s position on safeguarding national unification and territorial integrity is clear-cut. It is hoped that the U.S. side will adhere to the correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence’, and handle the Taiwan question with caution, so as to lay a solid foundation for China-US strategic cooperation and the development of bilateral relations.” 习近平强调，中方维护国家统一和领土完整的立场是很清楚的。希望美方坚持反对“台独”的正确立场，慎重处理台湾问题，为中美战略合作和两国关系发展奠定坚实基础.

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Xi’s remarks at the welcome ceremony at the White House set the tone for the engagement. He said:

“Both China and the United States are great countries, and both the Chinese and American peoples are great peoples. I am visiting the United States at President Trump’s invitation to carry on our friendship, expand cooperation, and promote the well-being of both our peoples. Facing the changes in our world, in our times, and of historical significance today, China and the United States, as two major countries, shoulder a historic responsibility of advancing human development and progress. Mr. President, during your visit to China this year, we agreed to build a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability, and this is widely welcomed by the people of our two countries and the international community. I am ready to work with you to steer the giant ship of China-U.S. relationship on a steady course toward the future.

• We should strengthen communication. China and the United States are different in national conditions, but through candid, in-depth and continued dialogue, our two countries can understand each other better, seek common ground while shelving differences, and build up mutual trust. President Trump and I have respect for each other. We have built personal rapport and stayed in touch. We encourage our government departments, such as those in charge of foreign affairs, economic matters, financial cooperation, law enforcement and people-to-people exchanges, to catch up on strengthening contact, and we support our legislative bodies in increasing exchanges.

• We should cooperate with sincerity. The interests of China and the United States are deeply intertwined, and there is plenty of room for us to work together. China-U.S. cooperation may not solve every problem in the world. But, without our cooperation, it would be hard to solve many of the world’s problems. China keeps its door wide open, welcomes American companies wanting to invest and do business there. We hope Chinese companies are treated fairly here in the United States. Working together, we can lengthen the list of cooperation, and shorten the list of issues. Both China and the United States are leading nations in artificial intelligence. We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people. On counternarcotics and law enforcement, the Chinese side is willing to strengthen cooperation with the United States. Our two sides may also increase direct flights to facilitate two-way travel and trade.

• We should coexist in peace. As I have said many times, China and the United States, as two major countries, stand to gain from cooperation and will both lose in confrontation. We do not need to avoid mentioning competition, but our competition should be a healthy one and should be kept within bounds. It should be a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which one either wins or loses. China and the United States must hold the line of no conflict and no confrontation between us, and we can certainly find the right path for our two great countries to get along on this planet we both call home. Our two militaries should maintain regular dialogue, and improve mechanisms for crisis communication and prevention. The Thucydides Trap can be overcome.”

He also announced an invitation for 100,000 young Americans to visit China for exchanges and study in the coming five years. This is double what was on offer during Joe Biden’s time. And Xi said that two pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, will be going to Zoo Atlanta.

Trump took Xi around for a bit of a tour of the White House, showing him presidential portraits. The White House X account shared a video of Trump mocking Biden during this engagement and Xi enjoying a rare public guffaw.

At the banquet at night, the presidential table seated Elon Musk, Tim Cook and Jensen Huang and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su. SCMP’s reporting adds:

“Other prominent US business leaders who attended the state dinner included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the CEO of Micron Technology Sanjay Mehrotra. Also in attendance were JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet, and Pfizer chairman Albert Bourla. No business executives from the Chinese side attended the dinner.” NYT has the full guest list if you are interested.

At the banquet, Trump offered Xi a giant bald eagle statue as a gift.

At the dinner, Xi said that “Today I held candid and in-depth exchanges with President Trump and reached many new consensus, enriching the substance of the constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability and providing new strategic guidance for China-US relations.” 今天我同特朗普总统进行了坦诚深入交流，达成很多新的共识，丰富了中美建设性战略稳定关系的内涵，为中美关系提供了新的战略指引.

He then traced the arc of the history of China-US relations. The choice of examples and language is worth noting.

“More than 200 years ago, at the very outset of its independence, the US turned its gaze towards China. China and the US exchanged what each had for what the other lacked and complemented each other’s strengths, opening up trade exchanges. President Washington purchased and collected a large amount of Chinese porcelain. More than 80 years ago, the peoples of China and the US fought shoulder to shoulder against the Japanese militarist aggressors and opened up the famous Hump air route. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Chinese soldiers and civilians rescued hundreds of American airmen, at the cost of several hundred thousand lives. This friendship forged in blood and fire will surely be passed down from generation to generation. More than 50 years ago, the Ping-Pong Diplomacy between China and the US knocked open the long sealed door to exchanges. Chairman Mao Zedong, President Nixon and other statesmen of the older generation, with the political wisdom of ‘the small ball turning the big ball’, opened the great process of normalization of China-US relations. The special state gift presented by President Nixon at that time, redwood trees, was planted in Zhejiang Province, where I once worked. More than 20 years ago, an American named Ronald Sakolsky funded the Chinese desert-control worker Yin Yuzhen to plant trees. Not long ago, this elderly man returned to China and saw with his own eyes that the desert of those years had become a lush and verdant forest. This story moved many ordinary Chinese people and is also a model of friendly exchanges between the peoples of China and the US.” 200多年前，美国独立伊始，便将目光投向中国，中美双方互通有无、优势互补，开启了贸易往来，华盛顿总统就购买、收藏了大量中国瓷器。80多年前，中美两国人民并肩作战，抗击日本军国主义侵略者，开辟了著名的驼峰航线。抗日战争期间，中国军民营救了数百名美国飞行员，付出数十万生命的代价。这份血与火锻造的友谊必将世代相传。50多年前，中美两国的乒乓外交叩开了尘封已久的交往大门。毛泽东主席和尼克松总统等老一辈政治家，以“小球转动大球”的政治智慧，开启了中美关系正常化的伟大进程。当年尼克松总统赠送的特殊国礼——红杉树，就种植在我曾工作过的浙江省。20多年前，一位名叫赛考斯的美国人资助中国治沙人殷玉珍种树。不久前，这位老人回到中国，亲眼看到当年的沙漠已经变成一片郁郁葱葱的森林。这个故事感动了许多中国民众，也是中美两国人民友好交往的范例.

He added: “Today, China-US relations once again stand at a new historical starting point. President Trump has put forward Make America Great Again and led the American people to achieve important development accomplishments. China is committed to realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and the building of Chinese-style modernization has continuously opened up new prospects. Both of these goals are grand, and can fully help each other succeed. We should demonstrate the responsibility of major countries, follow the people’s expectations and the overall trend of the times, and explore a new path for major countries to co-exist.” 今天，中美关系又站在新的历史起点上。特朗普总统提出让美国再次伟大，带领美国人民取得了重要发展成就。中国正致力于实现中华民族伟大复兴，中国式现代化建设不断开创了新局面。这两个目标都很宏伟，完全可以相互成就。我们应当展现大国担当，顺应人民期盼和时代大势，探索一条大国正确相处的新路.

I have not been able to locate any readouts from the US side. So what we have thus far is the Chinese official version of talks. The question is: what has been achieved tangibly from this visit? Well, the two sides have extended the Busan truce for another 60 days. This creates opportunities for Trump to attend the APEC summit in Shenzhen, and then a subsequent meeting between the two leaders at the sidelines of the G20 summit in the US. But beyond that, there’s little tangible that appears to have emerged. I guess we’ll see some numbers come from the US side whenever they release their reading of the engagement.

As of now, I agree with this FT report’s positioning of developments, i.e., pomp over substance. The report says:

“US President Donald Trump showered Xi Jinping with fanfare and flattery as he rolled out a literal and metaphorical red carpet for the Chinese leader in an extraordinary state visit where pomp appeared to prevail over substance. Trump laid on the charm even before Xi arrived at the White House on Thursday, writing on Truth Social that he looked “strong, vibrant, and fit”. The compliment was just the start of a remarkable day — culminating in a state dinner attended by many of the US business elite — that saw Trump fete the leader of the country that has become America’s top geopolitical rival. It was also deeply ironic that Trump was flattering the head of the Chinese Communist Party as his Republican Party warns of a looming socialist scourge if Democrats win control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.”

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Page 2: There’s a report informing that as per the 2025 Statistical Bulletin of China’s Outward Foreign Direct Investment. In 2025, China’s outward foreign direct investment flows were $213.58 billion, an increase of 11.1% over the previous year. Its outward investment stock was $3.4 trillion, which has remained among the top three in the world for 9 consecutive years, and its share of global investment rose to 7.4%.

The report adds that outward investment covers 18 industry categories of the national economy and is mainly concentrated in four sectors: leasing and business services, wholesale and retail, manufacturing, and finance. As of the end of 2025, China had established 58,000 enterprises abroad, spread across 189 countries and regions. These overseas enterprises employed a total of 4.761 million people, of whom 2.965 million were foreign employees.

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Page 4: There’s a report on Zhao Leji’s visit to Jilin and Heilongjiang. Xinhua says:

He “called for efforts to ensure elections of county and township people’s congresses are conducted in a law-based and orderly manner and with clean and upright conduct.” The report says:

“He emphasized that local people’s congresses must adhere to the organic unity of Party leadership, the people running the country, and law-based governance. They must earnestly implement the decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee. Under the leadership of the Party committee at the same level, they must plan and advance all work on the basis of their functions and duties and in light of local realities, helping local economic and social development and the tasks of tackling tough reform issues. Local people’s congresses must observe the limits of local legislative authority and grasp the functional positioning of local legislation as implementing, supplementary and exploratory. They must adhere to the principles of non-conflict with higher-level law, distinctive characteristics, and operability, and carry out local legislative work solidly and meticulously. Within the scope of their duties, they must carry out work such as filing and review and the cleanup of laws and regulations, safeguarding the unity of the national rule of law. They must adhere to correct oversight, effective oversight and law-based oversight. They must be premised on the central task, serve the overall situation and highlight key points, comprehensively use statutory forms of oversight, and embed support within oversight, forming a combined force for advancing work and solving problems. They must strengthen the self-construction of people’s congresses in accordance with the requirements of the ‘four organs’. They must pay attention to study and accumulation, strengthen investigation and research, and establish and act on a correct view of performance and achievement. By upholding fundamental principles and breaking new ground and seeking progress while maintaining stability, they must promote the high-quality development of people’s congress work. They must thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building, and push comprehensive and strict Party self-governance in people’s congresses to develop in depth.”

赵乐际在吉林省人大、黑龙江省人大和齐齐哈尔市人大机关调研立法、预算审查联网监督、县乡两级人大换届选举等工作，看望机关干部，并主持召开座谈会。他强调，地方人大要坚持党的领导、人民当家作主、依法治国有机统一，认真贯彻落实党中央决策部署，在同级党委领导下，立足职能职责、结合地方实际谋划和推进各项工作，助力地方经济社会发展和改革攻坚任务。要遵循地方立法权限，把握实施性、补充性、探索性功能定位，坚持不抵触、有特色、可操作原则，扎实细致做好地方立法工作。按照职责范围开展备案审查、法规清理等工作，维护国家法治统一。要坚持正确监督、有效监督、依法监督，围绕中心、服务大局、突出重点，综合运用法定监督方式，寓支持于监督之中，形成推进工作、解决问题的合力。要按照“四个机关”要求加强人大自身建设，注重学习积累，加强调查研究，树立和践行正确政绩观，守正创新、稳中求进推动人大工作高质量发展。要深入学习贯彻习近平党建思想，推动人大全面从严治党向纵深发展.

“Zhao Leji emphasized that the general elections of county- and township-level people’s congresses are a major event in China’s political life. We must adhere to Party leadership, fully promote democracy and act strictly in accordance with the law. We must do a solid job at every stage, including voter registration and voting, to ensure that election work is law-based and orderly, carried out in a clean and upright atmosphere, and a complete success. We must strengthen positive publicity and guidance, fully showcasing the practice of the people running the country and the strengths of the system of people’s congresses.”

赵乐际强调，县乡两级人大换届选举是我国政治生活中的一件大事。要坚持党的领导、充分发扬民主、严格依法办事，扎实做好选民登记、投票选举等各环节工作，确保选举工作依法有序、风清气正、圆满成功。要加强正面宣传引导，充分展现人民当家作主实践和人民代表大会制度优势.

Wang Huning presided over a meeting of the Chairpersons Council of the CPPCC National Committee. The report says:

“Wang Huning said that we must thoroughly study and implement the spirit of the important speech General Secretary Xi Jinping delivered when presiding over a meeting of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee. We must thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building, and deeply recognize the great significance of persistently advancing comprehensive and strict Party self-governance. It is necessary to thoroughly study and implement the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions on consolidating and expanding the results of the study and education on establishing and practicing a correct view of political performance, adhere to achieving political performance for the people and achieving political performance through solid work, and fulfill duties and take responsibility and action while closely aligning with the central tasks of the Party and the state.

It is necessary to thoroughly study and implement the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions on developing advanced manufacturing, and organize members of the CPPCC to offer advice and recommendations on key issues including making advanced manufacturing larger and stronger, raising the level of independent and controllable industrial and supply chains, and developing advanced manufacturing clusters.

It is necessary to thoroughly study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important expositions on work relating to agriculture, rural areas and rural residents, as well as the spirit of his important instructions sent in congratulation on the 9th Chinese Farmers’ Harvest Festival, focus on the tasks and arrangements for accelerating the building of an agricultural powerhouse and advancing agricultural and rural modernization, and organize CPPCC members to conduct research and put forward more valuable policy recommendations.

It is necessary to thoroughly study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important expositions on education, as well as the spirit of his important instructions sent in congratulation on the 42nd Teachers’ Day and on the 80th anniversary of the founding of Jilin University, and organize CPPCC members to focus on such task arrangements as implementing the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education, providing education that satisfies the people, and advancing in an integrated manner the development of education, science and technology, and talent, and do a good job in consultation and offering advice. It is necessary to thoroughly study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important expositions on strengthening basic research. We must organize CPPCC members to put forward forward-looking, innovative and operable opinions and suggestions. These are to cover optimizing the systemic layout of basic research, expanding the ranks of basic research talent, strengthening support and guarantees for basic research, and broadening international cooperation in basic research.”

会议传达学习贯彻习近平总书记近期重要讲话和重要指示精神。王沪宁表示，要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记主持召开中共中央政治局会议时的重要讲话精神，深入学习贯彻习近平党建思想，深刻认识持之以恒推进全面从严治党的重大意义。要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记对巩固拓展树立和践行正确政绩观学习教育成果作出的重要指示精神，坚持为人民出政绩、以实干出政绩，在紧扣党和国家中心任务中履职尽责、担当作为。要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记对发展先进制造业作出的重要指示精神，组织政协委员围绕做大做强先进制造业、提升产业链自主可控水平、发展先进制造业集群等重点问题建言献策。要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记关于“三农”工作的重要论述和致贺第九个“中国农民丰收节”的重要指示精神，聚焦加快建设农业强国、推进农业农村现代化的任务部署，组织政协委员研究提出更多有价值的对策建议。要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记关于教育的重要论述和致贺第四十二个教师节、致贺吉林大学建校80周年的重要指示精神，组织政协委员聚焦落实立德树人根本任务、办好人民满意的教育、一体推进教育科技人才发展等任务部署，做好协商建言工作。要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记关于加强基础研究的重要论述，组织政协委员围绕优化基础研究系统布局、壮大基础研究人才队伍、加强基础研究支持保障、拓展基础研究国际合作等，提出具有前瞻性、创新性、可操作性的意见和建议。

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Also on the page is a report on Li Qiang’s speech at the Fifth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou. Xinhua reports:

Li said that “China will further ease market access and improve policies for cross-border e-commerce retail imports…Li called for closer international cooperation to strengthen digital connectivity and advance the alignment and mutual recognition of standards. The international community should enhance North-South cooperation in the field of digital trade, and provide more support to developing countries in terms of technology, infrastructure and personnel training, he said.”

Li also met with Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim at the sidelines of the event. The report says:

“Li Qiang pointed out that China is willing to work with Malaysia to further leverage their complementary economic strengths, promote the high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road, ensure the implementation of major infrastructure projects such as the East Coast Rail Link, strengthen market connectivity and integration, expand and improve the quality of trade between the two countries, deepen cooperation in emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, new-energy vehicles, and semiconductors, and strive to achieve mutually beneficial and win-win outcomes at a higher level. China encourages more Chinese enterprises to invest in Malaysia. China has consistently required e-commerce enterprises to operate in compliance with laws and regulations overseas, adhere to mutual benefit and win-win outcomes, integrate into local markets, and avoid disorderly and irrational competition. China believes that Malaysia will continue to create a fair, stable and predictable investment environment.

The two sides should strengthen coordination of positions on major issues, deeply advance cooperation under the four major global initiatives, jointly oppose bullying practices, uphold the multilateral trading system, and defend their own legitimate rights and interests. It is hoped that Malaysia will continue to play its important role in encouraging ASEAN countries to continuously deepen cooperation with China and safeguard the common interests of the region.”

李强指出，中方愿同马方进一步发挥经济互补优势，推动高质量共建“一带一路”，抓好东海岸铁路等基础设施大项目建设，加强市场对接联通，推动两国贸易扩容提质，深化人工智能、新能源汽车、半导体等新兴产业合作，努力实现更高水平的互利共赢。中方鼓励更多中国企业赴马投资，一贯要求电商企业在海外合规经营，坚持互利共赢，融入当地市场，避免无序非理性竞争，相信马方将继续营造公正、稳定、可预期的投资环境。双方要加强在重大问题上的立场协调，深入推进四大全球倡议合作，共同反对霸凌行径，维护多边贸易体制，捍卫自身正当权益。希望马方继续发挥重要影响，推动东盟国家不断深化对华合作，维护地区共同利益.

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Anushka Saxena

At around 5:35 PM local time on September 23, 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s aircraft landed at Joint Base Andrews, and US President Donald Trump was already on the tarmac to receive him. But the images dominating headlines are those of Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Protocol Chief Hong Lei overseeing last-minute buffing of the red carpet by US officers before Xi descended.

Then there is also Xi looking fondly at Trump and grinning ear to ear when, at the State Dinner on September 24, the latter talked about how the US and China fought side by side in World War II and what a great partnership that was. I don’t know how Sanae Takaichi would be taking this after Trump already asked her for accountability over Pearl Harbour in March this year.

This was the first time since 1962 that a US president had personally greeted a visiting Chinese leader at the airport, and the contrasts that are making Xi look like a larger-than-life victor in the contemporary US-China contest are already emerging dominant. For example, in May 2026, when Trump flew to China, his airport reception in Beijing was handled by Vice President Han Zheng. Xi also got a 21-gun salute, a fighter jet flyover, a military review in the Rose Garden, and talks in the Oval Office on September 24. This is the third meeting between the two leaders in under a year, after Busan in October 2025 and Beijing in May.

I believe there are three takeaways to focus on as the meeting unravels and the world watches with keen interest.

• First, it is very true that today, Beijing arguably holds more cards than at any point since the trade war began in 2018. But it must be said that it does not hold all of them, and it cannot alone dictate the direction of ties.

• Second, in the past two years, China has reciprocated American concessions, but the nature of what each side is offering to “constructive strategic stability” and “win-win cooperation” differs significantly. Washington has given things that are much more strategic and hard to take back. Beijing has given things that are commercial, and, in some way, stopgap and easy to reverse.

• Third, while Xi cannot dictate exactly what the relationship will become in the future, he is increasingly setting the narrative frame and the pace of the back-and-forth. Chinese press releases, commentaries, and excerpts from his speech during this visit so far actively speak to that reality.

China Puts A Fine Point On It

Beijing’s output from the first two days of the visit is, in its reiteration of core concepts China wishes to attach to the visit, highly consistent. For instance, upon his arrival, Xi released a written statement via Xinhua that repeated a line first used in Beijing in May – that the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and “making America great again” can coexist, complement each other, and benefit the world. Then, we saw the oft-repeated call for the two countries to “be partners, not adversaries.” He then set out three “musts”: strengthen communication, cooperate sincerely, and coexist peacefully. Finally, he revitalised the emphasis on putting a ceiling and floor to the competition in the relationship, and moving towards “win-win cooperation” – a phrase that no longer means an absolute free flow of ideas, goods and people, but rather finding consensus on the ‘just enough’ necessary to maintain stability.

That sentiment was also echoed in Xi’s speech at the State Dinner, where he said that competition should be “benign and have boundaries,” describing it as “a race” rather than “a gladiatorial contest.” He also made a few non-surprising but notable asks of Washington and Trump:

• That Chinese companies be treated fairly in the US;

• That AI remain “under human control”;

• Cooperation on drug control and law enforcement;

• More direct flights;

• Regular military dialogue and better crisis communication.

He concluded that the “Thucydides Trap” can be overcome. He added two announcements. The first was an invitation to 1,00,000 American teenagers over five years. The earlier 50,000 target, set in November 2023, was met two-and-a-half years ahead of schedule. The second was a pair of giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, bound for the Atlanta Zoo.

In the talks, per the Chinese readout, Xi said the “constructive strategic and stable relationship” agreed in May “reflects the reality of the relationship” and must now be translated into action. Conveniently, of course, he missed the fact that Washington likes to add, “on the basis of fairness and reciprocity,” to the end of that phrase. Along the more expected lines, Xi urged Washington to adhere to the “correct” position of opposing “Taiwan independence” and to handle the question with prudence. He also declared his support for the US and Iran returning to the June 2026 MoU signed in Islamabad, meant to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The White House did not immediately issue a readout of its own, but Trump, for his part, spoke of a “great meeting,” a “truly great friendship,” and working towards “a more balanced trade relationship.”

Does Xi Hold All The Cards?

Beijing’s strongest card so far has been its export controls and licensing regime. That “Card” has actually worked more like a tap than a switch, and it would be interesting to watch for a decision on the lapsing of the US-specific ban on gallium, germanium, and antimony on November 27. Even under the truce, China shipped only 512 metric tons of rare-earth magnets to the US in August 2026 – a 21% drop from July. Needless to say, China’s layered legislative moat isn’t going anywhere, and Xi’s own words about as many as 50,000 American companies being invested in the Chinese market shed light on who will well be within the target range of the April 2026 decrees.

There is also the lapsing of the Busan consensus on a year-long trade truce, which is reportedly being extended for two months to January 10, 2027. The meetings between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his counterpart, He Lifeng, have a lot to do with it. That dynamic is likely to unfurl at the end of this meeting, and Trump has a major choice to make regarding the applicability of 100% tariffs under his latest ‘Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act’, on China. Against Xi’s demands to bring even the current tariff levels of ~32% to a stable and even 20%, the dilemma facing Washington is whether it can extract the most out of Beijing before it settles Section 301 tariffs at 7.5%, plus the new forced labour tariffs at 12.5%, bringing the total to the 20% Beijing demands.

There is also the question of whether the Section 122 surcharge can be brought back by Congress in case China doesn’t uphold its end of the bargain with sustained soybean imports and completion of the 200 Boeing aircraft deliveries, among other things. On the latter front, at least the 12 million tonne import mark for soybeans has been met by China in 2026, and, per US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, approximately 140 of the 200 committed Boeing aircraft are in a “good state” – whatever that means!

Grandstanding with Chinese Characteristics

What Xi has already been able to secure, in addition to benign ambiguity and a massive show of political will to negotiate by Washington, are irreversible concessions on the delay of arms sales worth US$14 billion to Taiwan, and the denial in 2025 of a New York “transit” for the island’s President, Lai Ching-te. Trump suspended the arms package delivery after May, calling it a “very good negotiating chip,” and it may now be postponed until after the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November, when Xi and Trump are expected to meet on the sidelines once more.

Beijing, meanwhile, has turned Nvidia’s H200 sales into a concession it grants, rather than a purchase it needs. Despite roughly US$10 billion in American licences, a Department of Commerce official told Congress in July that shipments to China had been “very few,” while Nvidia CFO Colette Kress stated in March that the company is yet to book any H200 revenue there. Then there are the reported instructions to confine Nvidia chips to overseas operations, and to steer a share of purchases towards domestic suppliers.

Returning to the question of win-win cooperation, managed restraint on chip imports is like China’s way of proving that leverage over supply chains runs both ways. It is actively denying Nvidia its largest foreign market for non-frontier AI chips, pushing demand towards Huawei and Cambricon, and, to some extent, mitigating dependency on CUDA. But Beijing has the cost of compute to face – even with every licensed H200 delivered, the US would retain a commanding lead, so Beijing’s wager pays off in one of two scenarios – that it closes the domestic fabrication gap really quickly, or relies on stockpiles until the conditions for free flow of imports, from its perspective, are met.

At the same time, forcing companies to navigate a tough, closed market is exactly where the trouble began in the first place – only, deflation, overcapacity and China’s inability to wean off an export model that itself depends on open markets, are evidently bigger problems now than they were in 2018. So the Xinhua commentary of September 23 can warn all it wants, that “over-securitising, politicising, and weaponising” trade disrupts supply chains. But the fact is that in countering US actions, China is massively taking a page out of its book, and – in the most reductionist way – changing nothing else internally.

What Trump [Probably] Wants

Trump’s approach to Xi and China involves pageantry, sure, but it also bilateralises the US-China relationship to the extent that alliances become secondary, and conversations on trade, sanctions, tariffs and supply chains become all about the two giants alone. With the US mid-term elections just a little over a month away, Trump may want deliverables he can sell, in addition to the successful peddling of an image that only he can deal with China best.

As Xi prepares to leave Washington in just a few hours, the tarmac welcome will evoke both pride and shame across various quarters and annals of history. The more telling signals will come later this year, when the export control suspensions expire, when the question of 100% tariffs on China, which buys so much of Russian oil, arises, or when the arms package to Taiwan either moves forward or does not. Until then, the “great ship” of US-China relations, as Beijing loves to call it, will carry onto choppy waters with hard-to-find floors and high-as-the-sky ceilings.

Eye on China is a weekly newsletter curated by the Geostrategy Programme at The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think-tank based out of Bengaluru, India.

Declaration on the use of AI/ML: Translation from Mandarin to English via the use of LLMs.

Page 1: As it happens when Xi Jinping is traveling to the US, we return to the story of his “true friends” from Muscatine, Iowa. Today, too, with the Chinese president expected to land at the Joint Base Andrews, the People’s Daily has a reporter speaking to Sarah Lande.

The story goes that Xi, when he was serving as the secretary of Zhengding in Hebei, had led a delegation to Iowa in 1985. There, he befriended Lande. In 2012, during his visit to the US as Vice President, Xi Jinping visited Lande’s home again. Fast forward to 2023, Xi “attended and delivered a speech at the welcome dinner jointly held by American friendly organisations in San Francisco, once again recalling with emotion the experience of his first visit to the United States. Before the dinner began, President Xi Jinping met with representatives of friendly American figures, chatting cordially about family matters and recalling their friendship with Lande and others.”

It was in this speech that Xi said that the Chinese side would be willing over the next five years to invite 50,000 American youth to China in five years. Lande felt that children from Muscatine should take part in this. She wrote to Xi about it and “with President Xi Jinping’s attention and care, from January 24 to 30, 2024, more than twenty students from Muscatine High School—the first group of American secondary school students to come to China under the programme—made an exchange visit to Beijing, Hebei, Shanghai and other places.”

正是在这场演讲中，习近平主席提出，为扩大中美两国人民特别是青少年一代交流，中方未来5年愿邀请5万名美国青少年来华交流学习。现场聆听这一倡议，兰蒂想到马斯卡廷很多从未走出艾奥瓦州更不曾离开美国的孩子们，想到他们如果能有幸踏上中国的土地，将会打开怎样一扇认识世界的窗口。一个念头在她心中萌生：一定要让马斯卡廷的孩子们参与到这个计划中。会后，兰蒂致信习近平主席，表达了这一愿望。在习近平主席关心下，2024年1月24日至30日，作为该项目第一批来华的美国中学生，马斯卡廷中学20多名学生到北京、河北和上海等地进行了交流访问.

The second section of the article tells the story of Luca Berrone from Des Moines, Iowa. Berrone was a board member of the Iowa Sister States in 1985 when Xi visited the region. The third section is about the Dvorchak family of Muscatine.

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Next, there’s a report (English report) on Xi extending “festive greetings and sincere regards on behalf of the CPC Central Committee to farmers and people working on agricultural and rural fronts ahead of the ninth Chinese farmers’ harvest festival…Xi noted that this year, China’s summer grain output hit a new record and early rice output remained stable, while a bumper autumn harvest is within sight. Party committees and governments at all levels should work to ensure that policies aimed at strengthening agriculture, benefiting farmers and enriching rural areas deliver greater outcomes and enhance the overall production capacity, quality and performance of agriculture, he said. Efforts should be made to expand channels for rural residents to increase incomes and build a beautiful and harmonious countryside for people to live and work in, based on local conditions, Xi said. The Chinese farmers’ harvest festival is the first national festival created specifically for the country’s farmers. This year’s festival falls on Wednesday. Launched in 2018, the festival coincides with the Autumnal Equinox each year, which is one of the 24 solar terms of the Chinese lunisolar calendar and usually falls between Sept. 22 and 24 during the country’s agricultural harvest season.”

Third, Xi sent a congratulatory letter (English report) to the 48th WorldSkills Competition.

Moving on, there’s a report on Li Qiang’s visit to Shanghai. The report says:

“He stressed the need to thoroughly implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions on developing advanced manufacturing and the spirit of the National Advanced Manufacturing Conference, adhere to the direction of intelligentisation, greening and integration, advance the deep integration of scientific and technological innovation with industrial innovation, vigorously develop a new generation of intelligent manufacturing, accelerate the cultivation and strengthening of emerging industries and future industries, and continuously make advanced manufacturing bigger and stronger.” 中共中央政治局常委、国务院总理李强9月22日在上海调研。他强调，要深入贯彻落实习近平总书记关于发展先进制造业的重要指示和全国先进制造业大会精神，坚持智能化、绿色化、融合化方向，推进科技创新和产业创新深度融合，大力发展新一代智能制造，加快培育壮大新兴产业和未来产业，持续做大做强先进制造业.

“At the Shanghai Electric National Pilot Testing Base for Artificial Intelligence Applications, Li Qiang inspected specialized robots and industrial robot products and demonstrations of their applications in complex scenarios. He listened to reports on the development of ‘AI+’ integrated service providers and the construction of AI-native factories, and visited a pilot workshop for the assembly and commissioning of intelligent robots. Li Qiang pointed out that the development of emerging industries such as artificial intelligence is changing with each passing day, and the application of related technologies is profoundly reshaping the technological system, production models, and industrial forms of manufacturing, opening up entirely new space for scientific and technological innovation and brand upgrading in manufacturing.” 在上海电气国家人工智能应用中试基地，李强察看专用机器人、工业机器人产品及其在复杂场景中的应用展示，听取“人工智能+”集成服务商、人工智能原生工厂建设情况汇报，参观智能机器人装配调试中试车间。李强指出，人工智能等新兴产业发展日新月异，相关技术应用正在深刻重塑制造业技术体系、生产模式和产业形态，为制造业科技创新与品牌提升打开了全新空间.

“It is necessary to combine the two advantages possessed by China’s manufacturing sector and digital-intelligent technologies, advance ‘AI+ manufacturing’ in depth, promote AI to better empower the development of advanced manufacturing, facilitate intelligent upgrading of the entire processes of R&D, production, management, and so forth, further activate the potential of data as a factor of production, drive the comprehensive digital-intelligent transformation of more industries, and build smarter industrial and supply chains. It is necessary to target common problems in the manufacturing field, focus on key links such as industrial design, pilot testing and validation, and intelligent operation and maintenance, build more manufacturing production-service platforms, strengthen the provision of integrated services and diversified solutions, help all types of enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, carry out intelligent transformation more efficiently and at lower cost, and continuously strengthen their development momentum and competitive advantages.” 要将我国制造业和数智技术两方面优势结合起来，纵深推进“人工智能+制造”，推动人工智能更好赋能先进制造业发展，促进研发、生产、管理等全流程智能升级，进一步激活数据要素潜能，带动更多行业全面数智化转型，打造更加智慧的产业链供应链。要瞄准制造领域共性难题，围绕工业设计、中试验证、智能运维等关键环节，打造更多制造业生产服务平台，强化集成服务和多样化解决方案供给，助力各类企业特别是中小企业更加高效、低成本开展智能化改造，不断增强发展动力和竞争优势.

“Shanghai’s Future Qidan Community is a science and technology innovation incubation platform focused on the field of future industries. Li Qiang visited to learn in detail about the construction of the community’s innovation ecosystem and the operation of the Shanghai Future Industries Fund, inspected technological products in fields such as brain-computer interfaces and quantum computing, and exchanged views cordially with science and technology innovation personnel and community staff. Li Qiang pointed out that future industries are a potential blue ocean for the development of advanced manufacturing. It is necessary to strengthen the tracking, analysis and assessment of the development of future technologies, strengthen tackling key core technologies, consolidate the underpinning of basic research, encourage bold exploration and tolerance of trial and error, and continuously expand the frontier of industrial innovation. It is necessary to build a first-class innovation ecosystem, promote the deep integration of industry, academia, research and application, strengthen science and technology services, and actively cultivate and open up application scenarios. In view of the characteristics of future industries—long growth cycles and high market risk—it is necessary to vigorously develop venture capital investment, expand patient capital, and establish mechanisms for the growth of investment in future industries and for risk sharing. Li Qiang stressed that talent is the primary resource, and only by possessing talent can one win the future. It is necessary to strengthen the talent-gathering and talent-cultivating functions of research institutions, innovation platforms, enterprises and science and technology programmes; to explore new models for cultivating top-notch innovative talent; and to strive to produce more high-calibre talent.”

上海未来启点社区是一个专注于未来产业领域的科创孵化平台。李强来到这里，详细了解社区创新生态建设、上海未来产业基金运行等情况，察看脑机接口、量子计算等领域技术产品，与科创人员、社区工作人员亲切交流。李强指出，未来产业是先进制造业发展的潜在蓝海。要加强对未来技术发展的跟踪分析和研判，强化关键核心技术攻关，筑牢基础研究支撑，鼓励大胆探索、包容试错，不断拓展产业创新前沿。要构建一流创新生态，推动产学研用深度融合，做强科技服务，积极培育和开放应用场景。针对未来产业成长周期长、市场风险大的特点，要大力发展创业投资，壮大耐心资本，建立未来产业投入增长和风险分担机制。李强强调，人才是第一资源，拥有人才才能赢得未来。要强化科研机构、创新平台、企业、科技计划的人才集聚培养功能，探索拔尖创新人才培养新模式，努力造就更多高素质人才.

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Also on the page is a report (English report) on Han Zheng meeting with Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk in Beijing. Xinhua reports:

“Han said the China-Cambodia ironclad friendship was jointly created and meticulously cultivated by the Chinese leaders of the older generation and Cambodia’s late King Father Norodom Sihanouk, remaining as solid as a rock despite winds and rains. China is willing to work with Cambodia to promote the implementation and effectiveness of the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, and to make China-Cambodia friendship deeply rooted in people’s hearts and passed down from generation to generation.”

Finally, Ding Xuexiang met with Kazakhstan’s First Deputy Prime Minister Nurlybek Nalibayev in Beijing. Xinhua reports:

“China and Kazakhstan are good neighbors, good friends and good partners linked by mountains and rivers and sharing a common future. In July this year, the two heads of state held a meeting, charting the course for the development of bilateral relations and the deepening of practical cooperation, Ding said. ‘As co-chairs of the China-Kazakhstan cooperation committee, we should fully implement the important common understandings reached by the two heads of state, give full play to the committee’s role in overall coordination, and promote new outcomes in practical cooperation in key areas such as trade and investment, artificial intelligence and green minerals, so as to better enhance the well-being of the two peoples,’ Ding said.”

Page 2: There’s a lot more positive propaganda around China-US ties on the page. So there’s this article with views from foreign experts from Pakistan, Norway, Germany to South Africa, talking about how they are looking forward to the Trump-Xi summit, because Sino-US “constructive strategic stability” matters to “world peace, stability and prosperity”.

Another article tells us about how moved American students were after receiving Xi’s reply letter. If you recall, Xi had recently replied to a letter from young students from 10 American universities who came to China to participate in a China-US youth exchange initiative.

Next, there’s a Zhong Sheng commentary ahead of the visit. As per this piece, the entire onus of the relationship rests with Washington. The US administration must not only get its act together, it must also get over its “erroneous perceptions of China” and let go of its “obsession with so-called ‘strategic competition’.” The pathway to doing this is to ensure that the consensus of the heads of state is adhered to; the US must “cherish the hard won momentum, maintain the right direction and eliminate interference.” It also “needs to maintain the continuity and stability of its policies and keep faith with its commitments”.

On the other hand, as per FT, the US seems to be unhappy that Beijing is not living up to the commitments it made on rare earths.

“In addition to concerns about US companies facing delays in getting rare earths, Washington has raised concerns with Beijing about restrictions on exports of the metals to Japan, which are also critical for US supply chains,” the paper had reported a couple of days ago. Finally, for all the talk of an AI dialogue and hotline, Politico reports that what’s on the table is a mechanism through which Treasury Secretary Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng can “contact one another in the event of an artificial intelligence related incident with national security implications.” Why two people who have nothing to do with AI as part of their portfolio should be equipped to be the face of this process is another question altogether.

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Anyway, back to our friend Zhong Sheng. The article says:

“At the invitation of US President Donald Trump, President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to the US from September 23 to 25. The two heads of state of China and the United States making reciprocal state visits within a period of six months is of great significance and has attracted worldwide attention. At a critical juncture in the development of China-U.S. relations, President Xi’s visit will inject key impetus into promoting the building of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability, and is of important significance for China and the US jointly opening up a new paradigm of major-country relations and joining hands to respond to global challenges.” 应美利坚合众国总统特朗普邀请，习近平主席将于9月23日至25日对美国进行国事访问。中美两国元首在半年内实现国事互访，意义重大，举世瞩目。在中美关系发展的历史关口，习近平主席此访，将为推动构建中美建设性战略稳定关系注入关键动力，对中美两国共同开创大国关系新范式、携手应对全球性挑战具有重要意义.

“China-US relations are the most important and most complex bilateral relationship in the world, and head-of-state diplomacy is the ‘stabilising anchor’ of the relationship between the two countries. Over the past year or more, after experiencing ups and downs, China-U.S. relations have displayed overall stability, with head-of-state diplomacy playing an irreplaceable role in providing strategic guidance. President Xi Jinping and President Trump have held two meetings, had five phone calls, and exchanged letters on multiple occasions, jointly taking the helm and setting the course for the giant ship of China-US relations, guiding the relationship through swift currents and dangerous shoals while maintaining the correct course. In May this year, President Xi Jinping held a meeting with President Trump, who was in China on a state visit, and the two heads of state jointly determined the new positioning of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability, providing strategic guidance for China-US relations over the next three years and even longer, which has been welcomed by the peoples of the two countries and by the international community. International scholars have noted that the new positioning of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability sketches out a rational, pragmatic and future-oriented vision of China-US relations, and reflects the approach to relations among major powers that China has consistently advocated.” 中美关系是世界上最重要、最复杂的双边关系，元首外交是两国关系的“定盘星”。过去一年多来，中美关系历经跌宕起伏后呈现总体稳定，元首外交发挥着不可替代的战略引领作用。习近平主席同特朗普总统2次会晤、5次通话、多次书信往来，共同为中美关系巨轮把舵定向，引领中美关系穿越急流险滩、保持正确航向。今年5月，习近平主席同来华进行国事访问的特朗普总统举行会晤，两国元首共同确定了中美建设性战略稳定关系的新定位，为未来3年乃至更长时间的中美关系作出战略指引，受到两国人民和国际社会的欢迎。有国际学者指出，中美建设性战略稳定关系新定位，勾勒出一种理性务实且着眼未来的中美关系愿景，体现了中方一贯坚持的大国相处之道.

Constructive strategic stability should be positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, benign stability with competition kept within bounds, normalised stability with differences kept controllable, and enduring stability with peace to be anticipated. The tortuous course that China-US relations have traversed in recent years clearly demonstrates that the fundamental crux of the unending difficulties in China-US relations is that the US side holds erroneous perceptions of China and cannot let go of its obsession with so-called ‘strategic competition’. The new positioning of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability fundamentally answers the basic question of ‘whether China and the United States are, after all, rivals or partners’, and recalibrates strategic perceptions of China-US relations. Differences between the two countries existed in the past, exist now, and will exist in the future, but this does not prevent the two sides from adhering to cooperation as the main thread and continuously strengthening the resilience of China-US relations in seeking common ground while reserving differences in exchanges and cooperation.” 建设性战略稳定，应该是合作为主的积极稳定、竞争有度的良性稳定、分歧可控的常态稳定、和平可期的持久稳定。近年来，中美关系走过的曲折历程清晰表明，美方抱持错误的对华认知，放不下所谓“战略竞争”执念，是中美关系困难不断的根本症结。中美建设性战略稳定关系新定位，从根本上回答了“中美到底是对手还是伙伴”这一根本性问题，校准了对中美关系的战略认知。两国的差异过去有、现在有、今后还会有，但这不妨碍双方坚持以合作为主线，在求同存异、交流合作中不断增强中美关系的韧性.

“Since last year, the Chinese and American economic and trade teams held multiple rounds of consultations and reached a series of consensuses and arrangements, giving the peoples of China and the United States and the world economy a ‘reassurance pill’. Over the past few days, the Chinese and American economic and trade teams have held economic and trade consultations in New York. Guided by the important common understandings reached by the two heads of state, the two sides engaged in candid, in-depth, and constructive exchanges on important economic and trade issues of common concern, including implementing the consensus reached in previous rounds of economic and trade consultations and promoting bilateral trade and investment. They also held dialogue on issues related to artificial intelligence. This fully demonstrates that China and the United States have extensive common interests, and further confirms that the essence of China-US relations is mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. By upholding mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, China and the United States can fully enable each other to succeed and prosper together.” 去年以来，中美经贸团队举行多轮磋商，达成一系列共识和安排，给中美两国和世界经济吃下一颗“定心丸”。这几天，中美两国经贸团队在美国纽约举行经贸磋商，双方以两国元首重要共识为引领，围绕落实历次经贸磋商共识、促进双边贸易投资等双方共同关心的重要经贸问题，进行了坦诚、深入、富有建设性的交流，并就人工智能有关问题举行对话。这充分说明，中美之间有着广泛共同利益，也进一步印证中美关系的本质是互利共赢。坚持相互尊重、和平共处、合作共赢，中美完全可以相互成就、共同繁荣.

“The key to building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability lies in the two sides moving towards each other and jointly taking action to implement the consensus of the two heads of state. For some time now, China-US relations have on the whole advanced along the track of constructive strategic stability determined by the two heads of state. The two major mechanisms of the two sides, i.e., political and diplomatic, and economic and trade, have continued to play their role; exchanges of delegations from legislative bodies, localities and enterprises have markedly increased; interaction and exchange among young people have grown ever more frequent; the warmth of exchanges in emerging fields such as AI and biomedicine has risen; and events such as the 2026 China-US Subnational Cooperation Dialogue and the third China-US Track 1.5 Dialogue have yielded highlights one after another… Multiple fields and levels in both countries are taking action, pooling strength for the building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability. The two sides should cherish the hard won momentum, maintain the right direction and eliminate interference. The American side in particular needs to maintain the continuity and stability of its policies and keep faith with its commitments, injecting certainty into the bilateral relationship and the development of the two countries through positive expectations of China-US cooperation. 构建中美建设性战略稳定关系，关键在于双方相向而行，共同采取行动把两国元首共识落到实处。一段时间来，中美关系总体沿着两国元首确定的建设性战略稳定轨道前行。双方政治外交和经贸两大机制继续发挥作用，立法机构、地方、企业团组往来明显增多，青年交流互动日益频繁，人工智能、生物医药等新兴领域交流热度上升，2026中美地方合作对话会、第三届中美1.5轨对话等活动亮点纷呈……两国多个领域、层级都在行动，为构建中美建设性战略稳定关系汇聚合力。双方应珍惜当前来之不易的良好势头，把准方向、排除干扰。美方尤其需要保持政策的连续性和稳定性，信守承诺，以中美合作的正面预期为双边关系和两国发展注入确定性.

“Building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability is a need of world peace and development, and is also where the responsibility of major countries lies. China and the US are permanent members of the UN Security Council and the world’s two largest economies, and bear a special responsibility for the peace, stability and development of the world. At present, the international situation is intertwined with transformation and turmoil, geopolitical conflicts are breaking out one after another, and global challenges are emerging in an endless stream. Whether it is promoting global economic recovery, resolving regional hotspot issues, or improving governance rules in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, cyberspace, and outer space, all of this requires coordination and cooperation between China and the United States. The international community generally hopes that China-US relations will maintain healthy and stable development, and that through more benign interaction they will inject stability, certainty and constructiveness into a turbulent and unsettled world. This year, China and the United States will respectively host the 2026 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and the G20 Leaders’ Summit; the two sides supporting each other and joining hands in cooperation is conducive to promoting world economic growth and improving global governance.” 构建中美建设性战略稳定关系，是世界和平发展之需，也是大国责任之所在。中美两国是联合国安理会常任理事国、全球前两大经济体，对世界的和平、稳定与发展负有特殊责任。当前，国际形势变乱交织，地缘冲突此起彼伏，全球性挑战层出不穷，无论是推动全球经济复苏、解决地区热点问题，还是完善人工智能、网络空间、外空等新兴领域治理规则，都离不开中美协调合作。国际社会普遍希望中美关系保持健康稳定发展，以更多良性互动，为动荡不安的世界注入稳定性、确定性、建设性。今年，中美将分别主办2026年亚太经合组织领导人非正式会议与二十国集团领导人峰会，双方相互支持、携手合作，有利于促进世界经济增长、完善全球治理。

“In the interaction of major countries, direction is of the utmost importance, and actions must all the more be solid and earnest. This Washington meeting is yet another important opportunity for the two sides to implement the consensus of the heads of state and advance a relationship of constructive strategic stability. We hope the American side will work together with the Chinese side to grasp the overall situation and move towards each other, continuously accumulating mutual trust, deepening cooperation and managing differences, so as to jointly walk out a correct way for major countries to get along in the new era, better benefiting the two countries and bringing benefit to the world.” 大国相处，方向至为关键，行动尤须笃实。此次华盛顿会晤，是双方落实元首共识、推进建设性战略稳定关系的又一重要契机。希望美方同中方一道，把握大局、相向而行，持续积累互信、深化合作、管控分歧，共同走出一条新时代大国正确相处之道，更好造福两国、惠及世界。

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We also have an article by Ambassador Xie Feng, which makes this propaganda push a full-court press. I hope I’ve used that correctly, since I don’t quite understand basketball as well, and frankly, I cannot think of an appropriate cricket metaphor at this point in time. Anyway, you get the idea. So Xie writes:

At the invitation of US President Donald Trump, President Xi Jinping is about to pay a state visit to the US. This is President Xi Jinping’s first state visit to the US in 11 years, and also sees the heads of state of China and the US realising reciprocal state visits within half a year, a milestone event in China-US relations and in international relations.应美国总统特朗普邀请，习近平主席即将对美国进行国事访问。这是习近平主席时隔11年再次对美国进行国事访问，也是中美两国元首在半年之内实现国事互访，是中美关系和国际关系中的里程碑事件.

“Over the past 11 years, the Communist Party of China has united and led the Chinese people in striving forward with high spirits; Chinese modernization has presented a vibrant and magnificent picture, and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable. Over the past 11 years, China-US relations have weathered winds and rains and undergone ups and downs, fully demonstrating that ‘decoupling and breaking chains’ cannot be accomplished, adopting a condescending posture does not work, and conflict and confrontation must not be pursued. Over the past 11 years, the profound changes unseen in a century have accelerated their evolution, the international situation has become increasingly intertwined with turmoil and disorder, and the world has an even greater need for a stable, healthy, and sustainable China–US relationship. President Xi Jinping has taken a far-sighted view, strategically planned and charted the course, and personally taken charge, pointing out a new direction, injecting new momentum, and writing a new chapter for the development of China–US relations.” 　11年来，中国共产党团结带领中国人民昂扬奋进，中国式现代化气象万千，中华民族伟大复兴势不可挡。11年来，中美关系经历风风雨雨，充分证明“脱钩断链”办不到、居高临下行不通、冲突对抗搞不得。11年来，百年变局加速演进，国际形势变乱交织，世界更加需要一个稳定、健康、可持续发展的中美关系。习近平主席高瞻远瞩，运筹擘画，亲力亲为，为中美关系发展指明新方向、注入新动能、书写新篇章.

“In May this year, President Xi Jinping and President Trump held a successful meeting in Beijing, and the most important political consensus reached was the determination of the new positioning of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability. This not only provides strategic guidance for China-US relations for the next three years and even longer, but also forges a new paradigm for major-country relations and opens bright prospects for world peace and prosperity. President Xi Jinping pointed out that a ‘China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability’ is not a slogan, but should be action in which the two sides move towards each other. We should take President Xi Jinping’s visit as an opportunity to further keep to the right direction, build consensus, eliminate interference and quicken our pace, so as to push the relationship between the two countries to develop continuously forward.” 今年5月，习近平主席同特朗普总统在北京成功会晤，达成的最重要政治共识就是确定了中美建设性战略稳定关系的新定位。这不仅为未来3年乃至更长时间的中美关系提供战略指引，也为大国关系打造新的范式，为世界和平繁荣开辟光明前景。习近平主席指出，“中美建设性战略稳定关系”不是一句口号，而应该是相向而行的行动。我们要以习近平主席此访为契机，进一步把准方向、增进共识、排除干扰、加快步伐，推动两国关系不断向前发展.

Grasping the mainstream, anchoring positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay. The common interests of China and the US far outweigh their differences; win-win cooperation is the mainstream, and all the more the general trend. The two sides should implement well the important consensus of the two heads of state, give full play to the role of the two major mechanisms of political-diplomatic and economic-trade consultations, expand exchanges in all fields including the two militaries, law enforcement, health, agriculture, tourism, science and technology, and people-to-people and cultural affairs, continuously lengthen the cooperation list and shrink the list of problems, and join hands to do more big things and good things that benefit the two countries and the world, promoting a win-win for China and the United States and a win for all the world. 把握主流，锚定合作为主的积极稳定。中美共同利益远大于分歧，合作共赢是主流，更是大势。双方要落实好两国元首重要共识，发挥好政治外交和经贸磋商两大机制作用，拓展两军、执法、卫生、农业、旅游、科技、人文等各领域交流，不断拉长合作清单，压缩问题清单，携手多办有利于两国和世界的大事、好事，促进中美双赢、世界共赢.

“Learning from and drawing on each other, shaping benign stability with competition kept within bounds. China and the US certainly have competition, but it should be benign. They should advance together by learning from each other’s strengths to offset their own weaknesses, and jointly create the future together through you chase me and I chase you approach, rather than consuming each other in a zero-sum game. Artificial intelligence bears on the well-being of all humanity, and what China and the US should compete over is how better to drive innovative development, ensure safety and controllability, promote mutual learning among civilisations, and improve global governance, so as to make AI develop towards a positive direction and for good and benefit humanity. There must be no erecting of a ‘silicon curtain’, still less the pursuit of an artificial-intelligence version of ‘Star Wars’.” 互学互鉴，塑造竞争有度的良性稳定。中美肯定有竞争，但应该是良性的，要在取长补短中共同进步，在你追我赶中共创未来，而不是在零和博弈中彼此消耗。人工智能关乎全人类福祉，中美应该比的是怎样更好驱动创新发展、确保安全可控、促进文明互鉴、完善全球治理，推动人工智能向上向善、造福人类，不能再设“硅幕”，更不能搞人工智能版“星球大战”.

“Mutual respect, maintaining normalised stability with differences are kept controllable. Having differences is not to be feared; the key lies in managing them constructively. The positive progress made in several rounds of China-US economic and trade consultations shows that, as long as the two sides uphold an attitude of equality, respect and mutual benefit and move towards each other, ways can be found to resolve each other’s concerns. Managing differences rests above all on good faith. Once something has been agreed, it must be put into action, and one must not say one thing and do another. The American side should stop fabricating pretexts such as so-called ‘national security’, ‘economic imbalance’ and ‘forced labour’ to wantonly impose containment and suppression on China.”　相互尊重，保持分歧可控的常态稳定。有分歧不可怕，关键在于建设性管控。中美数轮经贸磋商取得积极进展说明，只要双方秉持平等、尊重、互惠的态度相向而行，就可以找到解决彼此关切的办法。管控分歧重在诚信，谈成了就要付诸行动，不能说一套做一套。美方应该停止炮制所谓“国家安全”“经济失衡”“强迫劳动”等名目，对华滥施遏制打压.

“Holding fast to the bottom line, safeguarding enduring stability with peace to be anticipated. China and the US both benefit from cooperation and are both harmed by struggle. We must cross the ‘Thucydides Trap’, avoid the ‘tragedy of great power politics,’ and hold the bottom line of no conflict and no confrontation. China’s sovereignty, security and development interests brook no infringement, and the four red lines, i.e., the Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, path and system, and the right to development, brook no challenge. China adheres to the path of peaceful development, and hopes the American side will move towards it, so that peaceful coexistence between China and the United States promotes peace and tranquillity in the world.”　坚守底线，维护和平可期的持久稳定。中美合则两利，斗则俱伤。要跨越“修昔底德陷阱”，避免“大国政治的悲剧”，守住不冲突不对抗的底线。中国的主权、安全和发展利益不容侵犯，台湾问题、民主人权、道路制度、发展权利四条红线不容挑战。中国坚持走和平发展道路，希望美方相向而行，以中美和平共处促进世界和平安宁.

“People-to-people friendship has always been the source of strength for the development of China-US relations. Recently, multiple American polls have shown that American public opinion on China is warming and recovering, and in the first half of this year the number of American tourists travelling to China ranked first among non-neighbouring countries. The initiative proposed by President Xi Jinping to ‘invite 50,000 American young people to China for exchange and study over five years’ achieved its expected target two and a half years ahead of schedule, and the sincere friendship of Chinese and American young people across the Pacific has injected new momentum into the cause of friendship between the two countries.

Recently, the American friend Ronald Sakolsky and China’s desertification-control hero Yin Yuzhen were reunited across the ocean after 26 years, writing a new page of warmth and beauty in exchanges between the Chinese and American peoples. I once invited Ronald Sakolsky to the Chinese Embassy in the US to spend the Dragon Boat Festival together and issued him a visa to visit China, thanking him because ‘a kind heart helped grow a stretch of forest.’ On concluding his visit to China, Ronald Sakolsky said with feeling that it is precisely the sustained exchanges between ordinary American and Chinese people that build the bridge of friendship brick by brick and stone by stone. May the bridge stand forever and the trees stay evergreen. This is the deepest and most enduring strength for building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability.” 人民友好始终是中美关系发展的力量源泉。近期多家美国民调显示美涉华民意回升向暖，今年上半年美赴华游客人数在中国非周边国家中排名第一。习近平主席提出的“5年邀请5万名美国青少年来华交流学习”倡议提前两年半完成预期目标，中美青少年跨越太平洋的真挚友谊，为两国友好事业注入新动力。最近美国友人“赛考斯”和中国治沙英雄殷玉珍时隔26年跨洋重逢，中美人民交往书写新的温暖与美好的一页。我曾邀请“赛考斯”到中国驻美国大使馆共度端午，为他颁发访华签证，感谢他“一颗善良的心助长一片森林”。“赛考斯”在结束访华时动情地说，正是美中普通民众的持续交流，一砖一石搭起友谊之桥。桥永固，树常青，这是构建中美建设性战略稳定关系最深沉、最持久的力量.

“Head-of-state diplomacy is the ‘stabilising anchor’ and ‘compass’ of China-US relations. 2026 is a ‘major year’ for China-US relations, and President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the US will surely continue to lead the giant ship of China-US relations to cleave the waves and advance, proceeding steadily and going far. Looking ahead, we look forward to China and the US, under the helmsmanship and navigation of the two heads of state, jointly pushing the relationship of constructive strategic stability to be steadily implemented and put into practice, and walking out a correct way of getting along featuring mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.” 元首外交是中美关系的“定盘星”“指南针”。2026年是中美关系“大年”，习近平主席对美国的国事访问必将继续引领中美关系巨轮破浪前行，行稳致远。展望未来，我们期待在两国元首掌舵领航下，中美共同推动建设性战略稳定关系不断落地落实，走出一条相互尊重、和平共处、合作共赢的正确相处之道.

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Finally, there’s a short report telling us that the new Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that 57% of Americans believe the US should engage in friendly cooperation and contact with China.

If you’ve not had enough of China-US ties, then Page 5 is also dedicated to related feature pieces, including an article by Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

Before I move on, here’s a snapshot of the China-US rhetoric tracker that my colleague Pranay Kotasthane has built based on the coverage in this newsletter. What it tells me is that for all the talk about friendship in today’s paper, the actual “hostility rate” of rhetoric from Beijing has intensified in the past couple of months. As per our estimation, the hostility rate went down from 65.2% in April 2026 before Trump’s visit to 56.4% in May. It has then climbed in August and September. The current number is 68.1%. And the “convergence signal”, i.e., more cooperative rhetoric, has fallen from 45% in June to 39% in September. You can check out the tracker by clicking here.

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Page 3: There’s a report informing that in August, a total of 29,171 cases of violations of the central 8-point regulation were investigated nationwide. There were 15,431 cases of formalism and bureaucracy and 13,740 cases of hedonism and extravagance. In all, 35,901 people were involved. 24,494 people received Party disciplinary or administrative sanctions.

Another report says that as per the NDRC, in 2025, the overall output value of China’s BeiDou industry exceeded 629 billion yuan, with more than 30,000 enterprises and public institutions in the BeiDou industry and more than 2 million people employed in the sector. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, China will promote the scale of the BeiDou industry to exceed 1 trillion yuan within five years, achieving new breakthroughs in the marketization, industrialization, and internationalization of large-scale BeiDou applications.

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Page 4: There’s a report on leadership changes in certain key provinces.

• Hu Changsheng is now to serve as Party Secretary of. Hu replaces Wang Junzheng.

• Wu Xiaojun will now be Gansu Party Secretary

• Luo Dongchuan will serve as Secretary of the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee.

Also on the page is a report on comments by Wang Xiaohong, member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and Minister of Public Security, at a national video conference of public security organs on Tuesday. This bit is noteworthy:

“Wang Xiaohong called for always placing the prevention of political security risks in the foremost position, and deepening the struggle against infiltration, subversion, terrorism, separatism, and cults. Efforts should be made to thoroughly investigate and resolve conflicts and disputes, implement key control measures according to different levels and categories, severely crack down on prominent violations of law and criminal activities in accordance with the law, coordinate efforts in disaster prevention, reduction, and relief, continuously strengthen public security supervision, and make every effort to safeguard social stability. He called for strengthening the concept of ‘efficiently accomplishing one thing’, ensuring that existing policies are implemented and take effect, and planning and rolling out more incremental policies, so as to help the economy develop continuously towards the new, the better and the good. At present, it is necessary to do solid work on security for the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, ensuring that the people spend the holidays in safety.” 王小洪要求，始终将防范政治安全风险置于首位，深化反渗透反颠覆反恐怖反分裂反邪教斗争。深入开展矛盾纠纷排查化解，分级分类落实重点管控措施，依法严厉打击突出违法犯罪，协同做好防灾减灾救灾工作，持续强化公共安全监管，全力维护社会稳定。强化“高效办成一件事”理念，抓好存量政策落地落实，谋划出台更多增量政策，助力经济持续向新向优向好发展。当前，要扎实做好中秋、国庆安保工作，确保人民群众平安过节.

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Finally, Cai Qi spoke at the opening ceremony of an exhibition titled “The Great Expedition: Commemorating the 90th Anniversary of the Victory of the Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” on Tuesday morning at the Military Museum. Also present were: Yin Li, Li Shulei, Zhang Shengmin, Losang Jamcan and Wang Yong.

The report says:

“Cai Qi pointed out in his speech that, 90 years ago, the Communist Party of China led the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in overcoming countless difficulties and dangers and making enormous sacrifices, successfully completing the Long March, a development that shook the world and shines in the annals of history. The victory of the Long March achieved the great turning point at which the Communist Party of China and the cause of the Chinese revolution moved from setback to victory; it opened a new great advance in the Communist Party of China’s struggle to realise national independence and the liberation of the people; and it is a towering monument in the historical process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The great Long March spirit, forged by Chinese Communists and the officers and soldiers of the Red Army with their lives and their blood, has already been deeply integrated into the bloodstream and soul of the Chinese nation, and has become a powerful spiritual force inspiring and encouraging the Chinese people to continuously overcome difficulties and go from victory to victory.” 蔡奇在讲话中指出，90年前，中国共产党领导中国工农红军战胜千难万险，付出巨大牺牲，胜利完成震撼世界、彪炳史册的长征。长征的胜利，实现了中国共产党和中国革命事业从挫折走向胜利的伟大转折，开启了中国共产党为实现民族独立、人民解放而斗争的新的伟大进军，是中华民族伟大复兴历史进程中的巍峨丰碑。中国共产党人和红军将士用生命和热血铸就的伟大长征精神，已经深深融入中华民族的血脉和灵魂，成为鼓舞和激励中国人民不断攻坚克难、从胜利走向胜利的强大精神动力.

“Cai Qi said that the exhibition presents a panoramic display of the glorious course, valuable experience, great significance and far-reaching influence of the Long March conducted by the Red Army under the Party’s leadership. It fully demonstrates the magnificent journey along which the Party has led the people, over a long period and especially since the 18th Party Congress, in inheriting and carrying forward revolutionary traditions and continuously creating new historical splendour. It provides an important platform for conducting education in ideals and convictions, patriotic education and education in revolutionary traditions. The purpose of holding this exhibition is to guide the broad masses of cadres and ordinary people to deeply recognise that red political power did not come easily, that New China did not come easily, and that socialism with Chinese characteristics did not come easily; to forever bear in mind the great achievements of the Party and the Red Army; and to continue pushing forward the great cause pioneered by the revolutionary forebears. On the new journey, we must unite ever more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, fully implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, deeply grasp the decisive significance of the ‘Two Establishments’, resolutely achieve the ‘Two Safeguards’, vigorously carry forward the great Long March spirit, walk well the Long March road of the new era, strive vigorously and advance with courage and resolve, and struggle unremittingly to comprehensively advance, through Chinese-style modernization, the great cause of building a strong country and national rejuvenation.”

蔡奇说，主题展览全景式展现党领导红军进行长征的光辉历程、宝贵经验、伟大意义、深远影响，充分展示长期以来特别是党的十八大以来党领导人民继承和发扬革命传统、不断创造新的历史辉煌的壮阔征程，为开展理想信念教育、爱国主义教育和革命传统教育提供了重要平台。举办这个展览，就是要引导广大干部群众深刻认识红色政权来之不易、新中国来之不易、中国特色社会主义来之不易，永远铭记党和红军的丰功伟绩，继续把革命先辈开创的伟大事业推向前进。新征程上，要更加紧密地团结在以习近平同志为核心的党中央周围，全面贯彻习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想，深刻领悟“两个确立”的决定性意义，坚决做到“两个维护”，大力弘扬伟大长征精神，走好新时代的长征路，踔厉奋发、勇毅前行，为以中国式现代化全面推进强国建设、民族复兴伟业而不懈奋斗.

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Page 6: There’s a report on China’s Top 500 enterprises. Xinhua reports:

“China on Tuesday released the 2026 list of the country’s top 500 private enterprises, with 110 companies reporting operating revenue of over 100 billion yuan ($14.82 billion), underscoring robust growth in the country’s private sector. JD.com, Alibaba (China) Co, Ltd, and Hengli Group Co, Ltd retained the top three positions, according to the 2026 China Top 500 Private Enterprises list unveiled by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC) in Tianjin, northern China. This marks the 28th large-scale private enterprise survey conducted by the ACFIC. A total of 6,350 companies, each with operating revenue of over 1 billion yuan in 2025, participated in the survey this year. The top 500 companies by revenue make up the list.”

It adds:

“The top 500 private enterprises reported total operating revenue of 44.93 trillion yuan in 2025, up 4.35 percent from a year earlier. They also saw a combined net profit of 1.83 trillion yuan, with 17 companies each posting over 20 billion yuan in net profit. Manufacturing companies on the top 500 private enterprises list recorded total operating revenue of 32.22 trillion yuan, up 8.73 percent year on year. The top 500 are actively positioning themselves in strategic emerging and future industries. Of those that provided relevant data, 311 companies invested in 679 strategic emerging industry projects, and 82 launched 112 future industry projects. On innovation, the top 500 companies that provided relevant data reported total R&D spending of 1.26 trillion yuan, with R&D investment averaging 2.95 percent of revenue, according to the survey. In addition, the top 500 paid 1.3 trillion yuan in taxes last year, with 254 companies each paying over 1 billion yuan.”

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But what exactly is happening between these two countries? Because on the one hand, Washington and Beijing seem to be finding ways to manage their differences. On the other, the underlying relationship remains deeply competitive: over technology, trade, military power, and ultimately the shape of the international order.

Beijing is calling this a relationship of “constructive strategic stability”, a new framework it says will guide ties for the next three years and beyond. But what does that phrase actually mean? What does each side really want? And can a relationship this fraught be steadied by two leaders who both prize the personal touch?

To help us make sense of it, in this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to Jonathan A. Czin. Jonathan is the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings in Washington. Before that, he served in the Senior Analytic Service at the CIA, where he was the US intelligence community’s top expert on Xi Jinping.

We talk about where the China-US relationship stands, Xi as a negotiator and strategist, and whether chemistry between him and Trump really matters to the broader relationship. We also dig into the mood in Washington and on the Hill, how Beijing reads American politics ahead of the midterms, and how China is positioning itself on Iran, Ukraine, its own neighbourhood and the Global South.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work that I do, please do write to me. Your support can make a world of difference.

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Page 1: Let’s begin with the report on the September Politburo meeting. The big news is that the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee will be held in Beijing from October 26 to 29. The report adds:

“The Politburo heard a report on the solicitation of opinions within and outside the Party, within a certain scope, on the draft Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Several Major Issues Concerning Persistently Advancing Comprehensive and Strict Party Self-Governance. It decided that, after revisions are made in accordance with the opinions discussed at this meeting, the draft document would be submitted to the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee for deliberation.” 中共中央政治局听取了《中共中央关于持之以恒推进全面从严治党若干重大问题的决定》稿在党内外一定范围征求意见的情况报告，决定根据这次会议讨论的意见进行修改后将文件稿提请二十届五中全会审议. (Note: What this means is that the outcome of the fifth plenum is now agreed upon among the top echelons of the Party. So this document will carry the day at the plenum.)

“The meeting pointed out that this solicitation of opinions promoted democracy and pooled collective wisdom. All regions, all departments and all sectors fully affirmed the draft decision, holding that the draft decision summarises, in a manner of seeking truth from facts, the achievements and experience of comprehensive and strict Party self-governance in the new era; profoundly analyses the situation and tasks facing Party building at present and for a period to come; makes strategic arrangements for persistently advancing comprehensive and strict Party self-governance; embodies the historical initiative of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core in strengthening the Party and strengthening the country; and is of major practical significance and far-reaching guiding significance for advancing the new great project of Party building in the new era, and for uniting and leading the people of all ethnic groups across the country in comprehensively advancing, through Chinese-style modernization, the great cause of building a strong country and national rejuvenation.” 会议指出，这次征求意见发扬民主、集思广益，各地区各部门各方面对决定稿给予充分肯定，认为决定稿实事求是总结新时代全面从严治党的成就和经验，深刻分析当前和今后一个时期党的建设面临的形势和任务，对持之以恒推进全面从严治党作出战略部署，体现了以习近平同志为核心的党中央强党强国的历史主动，对于推进新时代党的建设新的伟大工程，团结带领全国各族人民以中国式现代化全面推进强国建设、民族复兴伟业，具有重大现实意义和长远指导意义.

“The meeting stressed that persistently advancing comprehensive and strict Party self-governance must uphold Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of the ‘Three Represents’ and the Scientific Outlook on Development; fully implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building; focus on realising the Party’s mission and tasks; implement the general requirements for Party building in the new era; take the Party Constitution as the fundamental basis; uphold the Party’s nature as a vanguard; uphold the Party’s overall leadership and the centralised, unified leadership of the Party Central Committee; focus on enhancing the Party’s capacity for long-term governance, maintaining the Party’s advanced nature and purity, and maintaining the Party’s flesh-and-blood ties with the masses; unwaveringly adhere to the strict tone; improve the system of comprehensive and strict Party self-governance; with the Party’s political building as the overarching guide, comprehensively advance the building of the Party in all respects; fully stimulate the enthusiasm, initiative and creativity of the entire Party; continuously realise the Party’s self-purification, self-perfection, self-renewal and self-enhancement; continuously strengthen the Party’s political leading power, ideological guiding power, mass organising power and social rallying power; and ensure that the Party always remains a vigorous Marxist governing party that walks at the forefront of the times, is heartily supported by the people, and can withstand the tests of all kinds of storms and waves, and always remains the strong leadership core of the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”　会议强调，持之以恒推进全面从严治党必须坚持马克思列宁主义、毛泽东思想、邓小平理论、“三个代表”重要思想、科学发展观，全面贯彻习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想，深入学习贯彻习近平党建思想，围绕实现党的使命任务，落实新时代党的建设总要求，以党章为根本，坚持党的先锋队性质，坚持党的全面领导和党中央集中统一领导，着眼于提高党的长期执政能力、保持党的先进性和纯洁性、保持党同人民群众的血肉联系，坚持严的基调不动摇，健全全面从严治党体系，以党的政治建设为统领，全面推进党的各方面建设，充分激发全党积极性主动性创造性，不断实现党的自我净化、自我完善、自我革新、自我提高，持续增强党的政治领导力、思想引领力、群众组织力、社会号召力，确保党始终成为走在时代前列、人民衷心拥护、经得起各种风浪考验、朝气蓬勃的马克思主义执政党，始终成为中国特色社会主义事业的坚强领导核心。

“The meeting emphasized that the entire Party must, from the strategic height of consolidating the Party’s governing position and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, deeply understand the importance and urgency of persistently advancing comprehensive and strict Party self-governance; strengthen confidence and maintain strategic resolve; uphold and make good use of the valuable experience of comprehensive and strict Party self-governance in the new era with higher standards and more practical measures; rectify and resolve well the prominent problems facing Party building; consolidate and develop well the favorable political situation formed through managing the Party and exercising strict governance over the Party; and continuously open up a new situation in governing and rejuvenating the Party and strengthening the Party in the new era.” 会议强调，全党必须从巩固党的执政地位、实现中华民族伟大复兴的战略高度，深刻认识持之以恒推进全面从严治党的重要性紧迫性，坚定信心，保持定力，以更高标准、更实举措把新时代全面从严治党宝贵经验坚持好、运用好，把党的建设面临的突出问题整治好、解决好，把管党治党形成的良好政治局面巩固好、发展好，不断开创新时代管党治党、兴党强党新局面.

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The other big report on the page is the confirmation that the Politburo heard individual reports on the cases of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli and accepted their findings. The report says:

“The investigation found that Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli abandoned their original aspiration and mission, become estranged from the Party in heart and deed, lost Party spirit and principles, and crossed red lines and bottom lines; they seriously violated political discipline and political rules, formed cliques and factions, and were disloyal and dishonest towards the Party; they seriously violated organisational discipline, using the convenience of their positions to provide assistance to others in job promotion and other matters, and accepting enormous sums of money; they seriously violated integrity discipline, accepting gifts and cash gifts in violation of regulations; they seriously violated work discipline, failing to fulfil the political responsibility of comprehensive and strict Party self-governance; and they seriously violated discipline in private life, failing to educate and manage relatives and staff around them.” 经查，张又侠、刘振立背弃初心使命、与党离心离德、丧失党性原则、逾越红线底线，严重违反政治纪律和政治规矩，搞团团伙伙，对党不忠诚不老实；严重违反组织纪律，利用职务便利为他人职务晋升等提供帮助，收受巨额钱款；严重违反廉洁纪律，违规收受礼品礼金；严重违反工作纪律，不履行全面从严治党政治责任；严重违反生活纪律，对亲属和身边工作人员失教失管.

“Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli seriously violated Party discipline and are suspected of serious duty-related crimes. Their political problems and economic problems are intertwined; graft and the amassing of wealth coexist with dereliction and malfeasance in office; the sums involved are especially enormous; the nature of the case is extremely serious; and the impact is extremely vile. In accordance with the Regulations of the Communist Party of China on Disciplinary Actions and other relevant provisions, following study by an executive meeting of the Central Military Commission and submission to the meeting of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee for deliberation, it was decided to impose on Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli the sanction of expulsion from the Party, to terminate the qualifications of both as delegates to the 20th Party Congress, and to transfer the their suspected criminal problems to the military procuratorial organs for review and prosecution in accordance with the law. The sanction of expulsion from the Party imposed on the two will be ratified when a plenary session of the Central Committee is convened. Prior to this, the Central Military Commission had already decided to impose on Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli the sanction of expulsion from the military.” 张又侠、刘振立严重违反党的纪律，涉嫌严重职务犯罪，政治问题和经济问题交织，贪腐敛财与失职渎职并存，涉案金额特别巨大，性质极其严重，影响极为恶劣。依据《中国共产党纪律处分条例》等有关规定，经中央军委常务会议研究并报中共中央政治局会议审议，决定给予张又侠、刘振立开除党籍处分，终止2人党的二十大代表资格，将涉嫌犯罪问题移送军事检察机关依法审查起诉。给予2人开除党籍的处分，待召开中央委员会全体会议时予以追认。此前，中央军委已决定给予张又侠、刘振立开除军籍处分.

“The serious investigation and handling of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli fully demonstrates the clear-cut attitude of the Party Central Committee and the Central Military Commission in carrying the anti-corruption struggle through to the end, and once again shows the firm position that punishing corruption has no forbidden zones, full coverage and zero tolerance, and that there must absolutely be no place in the military for corrupt elements to hide. It is a major achievement of the anti-corruption struggle of the Party and the military, and an important embodiment of the Party and the military having determination and strength. The people’s army has undergone revolutionary forging in the anti-corruption struggle, becoming purer and more consolidated, and possessing greater cohesion and combat effectiveness.” 对张又侠、刘振立的严肃查处，充分彰显党中央、中央军委将反腐败斗争进行到底的鲜明态度，再次表明惩治腐败无禁区、全覆盖、零容忍，军中绝不能有腐败分子藏身之地的坚定立场，是党和军队反腐败斗争取得的重大成果，是党和军队有决心、有力量的重要体现，人民军队在反腐败斗争中经受革命性锻造，更加纯洁巩固、更具强大凝聚力战斗力.

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Next, there’s a brief report confirming that Xi Jinping will be visiting the US from September 23 to 25 for the summit meeting with President Donald Trump. Another report talks about Xi replying to students from 10 US universities who wrote to him after attending youth exchanges in China.

Xinhua says:

“Xi said he was pleased to hear that the students expressed in the letter their appreciation for Chinese civilization, their hope for friendly cooperation between China and the United States, and their willingness to act as envoys of friendship bridging the Pacific Ocean. Young people from China and the United States, Xi said, share the same planet Earth and jointly shoulder the mission of the times. He expressed hope that the students would join the vast number of young people in both countries in striving to carry forward, uphold, and advance China-U.S. friendly cooperation, and work together to foster mutual understanding and affinity between the two peoples and to ensure the steady and long-term development of bilateral relations, so as to contribute the vitality of youth to building a better world.”

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Next, there’s a long Guo Jinping article on the page, discussing China-US ties. The article says that the “two heads of state making reciprocal state visits within half a year is of historic and milestone significance.” 两国元首在半年内实现国事互访，具有历史性、里程碑意义.

“In May this year, President Xi Jinping and President Trump held a historic meeting in Beijing, jointly establishing a new positioning for bilateral relations, i.e., building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stabilityThey made clear that the two countries would work together toward a direction in which cooperation is the mainstay, competition is conducted within bounds, differences are controllable, and peace can be expected, and explore the correct way for major countries to get along in the new era. Having passed through wind and rain, the giant ship of China-US relations has anchored to brand-new coordinates and set out once more on a new journey. From Beijing to Washington, the two heads of state are meeting again after an interval of four months, which will provide strategic guidance for the China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability to proceed steadily and go far. 2026 is destined to become a historic and landmark year in the continuation and development of China-US relations. The weighty historical responsibility of jointly shaping a new picture of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability has fallen upon the shoulders of China and the United States and of the two peoples.” 今年5月，习近平主席同特朗普总统在北京举行历史性会晤，共同确立了构建中美建设性战略稳定关系的两国关系新定位，明确两国朝着合作为主、竞争有度、分歧可控、和平可期的方向携手努力，探索新时代大国正确相处之道。穿越风雨，中美关系巨轮锚定全新坐标再启新程。从北京到华盛顿，两国元首时隔4个月再次会晤，将为中美建设性战略稳定关系行稳致远提供战略引领。2026年，注定成为中美关系继往开来的历史性、标志性年份。共同塑造建设性战略稳定的中美关系新图景，这份沉甸甸的历史责任，已落在中美两国和两国人民的肩头.

It adds:

“The core of the new positioning is concentrated in the organic unity of the ‘four stabilities’. Positive stability, with cooperation as the mainstay, means abandoning the logic of opposition and confrontation, placing cooperation in a prominent position in the bilateral relationship, and continuously enlarging the basic foundation of common interests. Benign stability, with competition kept within bounds, means acknowledging that competition objectively exists between major countries, but that competition should adhere strictly to boundaries and follow rules, and must not be generalised into all-round confrontation. Normalised stability, with differences being controllable, means squarely facing the long-term and complex nature of differences, managing and controlling risks through dialogue and consultation, and preventing contradictions from escalating out of control. Enduring stability, with peace to be anticipated, means firmly holding the fundamental bottom line of peace and pursuing long-term peaceful coexistence.” 新定位的内核，集中体现为“四个稳定”的有机统一。合作为主的积极稳定，就是摒弃对立对抗的逻辑，把合作摆在双边关系的突出位置，持续做大共同利益的基本盘；竞争有度的良性稳定，就是承认大国之间客观存在竞争，但竞争应当恪守边界、遵循规则，不能把竞争泛化为全方位对抗；分歧可控的常态稳定，就是正视分歧的长期性、复杂性，通过对话协商管控风险，防止矛盾升级失控；和平可期的持久稳定，就是牢牢守住和平这条根本底线，追求长期和平共处.

And then it says:

“Taking the long view, since 1949 the positioning of China-US relations has undergone several adjustments, including ‘enemy’, ‘quasi-ally’, ‘constructive strategic partnership’, ‘partnership’, ‘stakeholder,’ and ‘new type of major-country relationship’. Over the past 10 years, China-US relations have experienced ups and downs, adapting amid friction, adjusting through dialogue, and accumulating consensus amid strategic contestation, traversing an extraordinary journey. The ways the two sides deal with each other have grown increasingly rational and mature, and the mechanisms for handling differences have been continuously improved. This proves once again that the zero-sum game leads nowhere, that confrontation and conflict have no winners, and that dialogue and cooperation are the only correct choice for China and the US.” 把时间拉长，自1949年以来，中美关系定位经历了多次调整，例如，“敌人”“准盟友”“建设性战略伙伴关系”“合作伙伴关系”“利益攸关方”“新型大国关系”等。近10年来，中美关系跌宕起伏，在摩擦中磨合，在对话中调整，在博弈中积累共识，走过了一段不平凡的历程。双方打交道的方式日趋理性成熟，处理分歧的机制不断完善。这也再次证明，零和博弈没有出路，对抗冲突没有赢家，对话与合作是中美唯一正确选择.

“Entering the new era, China’s diplomacy has actively promoted coordination and sound development among major countries, and pushed for the construction of a pattern of major-country relations featuring peaceful coexistence, overall stability, and balanced development. The proposal of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability shows that the Chinese side hopes, through a more resilient and more sustainable model, to realise peaceful coexistence, risk management and control, and cooperative progress between China and the US. Neither evading contradictions nor seeking to return to the past, but rather grounded in reality and seeking actual results, this embodies the maturity and confidence of China’s diplomacy.” 进入新时代，中国外交积极促进大国协调和良性发展，推动构建和平共处、总体稳定、均衡发展的大国关系格局。中美建设性战略稳定关系的提出，表明中方希望以更具韧性、更可持续的模式，实现中美和平共处、管控风险、合作共进。不回避矛盾，也不追求回到过去，而是立足于现实，求之于成效，体现了中国外交的成熟自信.

“The new positioning demonstrates profound insight into the laws of history. In today’s world, the profound changes unseen in a century are evolving at an accelerated pace, and the international situation is intertwined with volatility and transformation. Amid this, can China and the United States transcend the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can they join hands to respond to global challenges and inject more stability into the world? Can they, with a view to the well-being of the two peoples and the future and destiny of humanity, jointly create a bright future for bilateral relations? These questions of history, questions of the world and questions of the people test the wisdom and sense of responsibility of both sides.” 新定位彰显对历史规律的深刻洞察——当今世界，百年变局加速演进，国际形势变乱交织。动荡变革之下，中美两国能否跨越“修昔底德陷阱”，开创大国关系新范式？能否携手应对全球性挑战，为世界注入更多稳定性？能否着眼两国人民福祉和人类前途命运，共同开创两国关系美好未来？这些历史之问、世界之问、人民之问，考验双方的智慧与担当.

“The so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ is, in essence, a narrative of zero-sum confrontation originating from the West’s past history. Building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability is precisely aimed at breaking this old logic. The new positioning emphasises benign competition rather than vicious confrontation, and moving towards each other rather than running in opposite directions. Its goal is to achieve mutual accomplishment and common prosperity, rather than your-loss-my-gain and the zero-sum game, realising the dynamic balance of China-US relations through strengthened cooperation, effective management and control, and joint shaping. This offers a brand-new line of thinking and a feasible path for resolving the ‘Thucydides Trap’. Countries of different civilisations, different systems and different paths can entirely coexist peacefully and develop together. The Earth is big enough to accommodate the common development and respective prosperity of China and the US.” 所谓“修昔底德陷阱”，本质上就是一套源于西方过往历史的零和对抗叙事。构建中美建设性战略稳定关系，正是要破除这套旧逻辑。新定位强调良性竞争而非恶性对抗，强调相向而行而非背道而驰，其目标是实现相互成就、共同繁荣，而非你输我赢、零和博弈，通过加强合作、有效管控和共同塑造来实现中美关系的动态平衡。这为破解“修昔底德陷阱”提供了全新思路和可行路径。不同文明、不同制度、不同道路的国家完全可以和平共处、共同发展。地球足够大，容得下中美两国共同发展、各自繁荣.

“The new positioning demonstrates the responsibility of a major country towards its international obligations. A stable China-US relationship is in itself the greatest contribution to world peace and development. As permanent members of the UN Security Council and the world’s two largest economies, China and the United States together account for more than one-third of the world’s total economic output, and nearly one-quarter of the world’s population. China-US relations have long since transcended the bilateral realm, becoming a key variable affecting global peace, stability, development, cooperation and governance. Building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability is an unprecedented path of exploration forged by the two major countries of China and the United States in a spirit of responsibility to history, to the people and to the world. It will profoundly influence the evolution of the international landscape and inject all the more precious certainty into a turbulent and unsettled world. Under the guidance of this new paradigm of a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability, the world can hope to emerge from the quagmire of the zero-sum game and advance towards a more stable, cooperative and just future.”

新定位彰显对国际责任的大国担当——一个稳定的中美关系，本身就是对世界和平与发展的最大贡献。作为联合国安理会常任理事国和世界前两大经济体，中美两国经济总量超过世界1/3，人口总数占世界近1/4。中美关系早已超越双边范畴，成为牵动全球和平、稳定、发展、合作和治理的关键变量。构建中美建设性战略稳定关系，是中美两个大国本着对历史、对人民、对世界负责的态度，走出的一条前无古人的探索之路，将深刻影响国际格局演进，为动荡不安的世界注入弥足珍贵的确定性。在中美建设性战略稳定关系这一新范式引导下，世界有望走出零和博弈的泥潭，迈向一个更加稳定、合作与公正的未来.

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The second section of the article talks about the engagements between the two sides. The author praises head of state diplomacy for providing the “anchor and compass” for the relationship. Then the article adds:

“For relations between major countries to proceed steadily and go far, they cannot do without the solid support of an institutional framework. Under the guidance of the heads-of-state consensus, the relevant departments of China and the US have maintained communication in areas including economic and trade affairs, diplomacy, the two militaries, counternarcotics, law enforcement, artificial intelligence, and people-to-people exchanges, injecting stability into the respective development of the two countries through positive expectations.

The Chinese and American economic and trade teams are maintaining close communication on specific arrangements such as the structure, functions and operating mode of the Trade Council, pushing China-US economic and trade consultations to shift from crisis-style response to institutionalised management. The 2026 working group meeting of the China-US Military Maritime Consultative Agreement mechanism was held, with the two militaries effectively enhancing mutual understanding and avoiding misunderstanding and misjudgement. The 2026 China-US Subnational Cooperation Dialogue, China-US business community dialogue and exchange activities, the third China-US Track 1.5 Dialogue and other activities were held in succession, and exchanges and interactions between localities, business communities, and strategic and academic circles have grown increasingly active… The network of multi-level, multi-track dialogue and cooperation between China and the United States is becoming increasingly dense, and the foundation of mutual trust increasingly solid, building an institutional barrier for candid communication, resolving differences, and managing crises.” (Note: This conclusion is quite the overstatement. But let’s roll with it.)

大国关系行稳致远，离不开制度框架的坚实托举。在元首共识引领下，中美双方有关部门在经贸、外交、两军、禁毒、执法、人工智能、人文交流等领域保持沟通，以正面预期为两国各自发展注入稳定性。中美双方经贸团队正在就贸易理事会架构、职能、运行模式等具体安排保持密切沟通，推动中美经贸磋商由危机式应对转向机制化管理；2026年度中美海上军事安全磋商机制工作小组会议举行，中美两军有效增进相互了解、避免误解误判；2026中美地方合作对话会、中美工商界对话交流活动、第三届中美1.5轨对话等活动相继举办，地方、工商界、战略学术界等交流往来日益活跃……中美双方多层次、多轨道的对话合作网络越织越密，互信根基越扎越深，为坦诚沟通、化解分歧、管控危机筑牢制度屏障。

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“As China-US relations forge ahead through the waves, economic and trade cooperation should continue to serve as the ‘ballast stone’ and ‘propeller’. Business organizations such as the US-China Business Council and the American Chamber of Commerce in China have organized business delegations to visit China on multiple occasions, and interactions between entrepreneurs of the two countries have become more frequent; cooperation in traditional areas such as agricultural products, energy and commodities is advancing in an orderly manner, while exchanges in emerging areas such as artificial intelligence and biomedicine are gaining momentum...The positive signals released by the market are precisely the most vivid confirmation of the essence of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation in China-US economic and trade relations.

Two latest sets of survey data are particularly persuasive. The latest report of the US-China Business Council shows that 95% of surveyed companies believe that their business in China helps them maintain global competitiveness, while 92% of surveyed companies achieved profits in China last year, and many companies plan to continue expanding their investment presence in China. The latest 2026 China Business Report released by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai shows that, driven by improved financial performance, an improved geopolitical environment, and an optimized regulatory environment, the profitability and business confidence of US companies operating in China that were surveyed have both rebounded substantially. The business communities of China and the United States are gathering streams of warmth from mutually beneficial cooperation, maintaining the fundamentals of China-US economic and trade cooperation, and speaking out and contributing their strength to the forging ahead of China-US relations.”

(Note: This is the message that Beijing clearly wants to highlight to the Trump administration. The key argument is that the deals are still great if you work with China, and there is a lot of money to be made. It’s an important positioning from Beijing, given the commercial pillar is the priority pillar for Trump.)

中美关系破浪前行，经贸合作应该继续成为压舱石和推进器。美中贸易全国委员会、中国美国商会等工商团体多次组织企业代表团访华，两国企业家往来互动更加频繁；农产品、能源、大宗商品等传统领域合作有序推进，人工智能、生物医药等新兴领域交流热度上升……市场释放出的积极信号，正是中美经贸互利共赢本质最生动的印证。两份最新调查数据颇具说服力。美中贸易全国委员会最新报告显示，95%的受访企业认为在华业务有助其维持全球竞争力，92%的受访企业去年在中国实现盈利，不少企业规划继续扩大在华投资布局。上海美国商会发布的最新《2026年中国商业报告》显示，受财务业绩好转、地缘环境改善以及监管环境优化的推动，受访在华美企盈利水平、经营信心均大幅回升。中美工商界正汇聚起一股股互利合作的暖流，维护住中美经贸合作的基本面，为中美关系砥砺前行发声出力。

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The third section of the article is where the author starts to draw specific red lines and pull out the sticks that Beijing holds.

“Building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability requires establishing correct strategic perceptions; this is the ‘first button’ that must be fastened correctly. When perceptions go astray, actions easily deviate from the right track. For a long time, some people on the American side have clung to a Cold War mentality, regarded China as a strategic rival, and trumpeted the narrative of strategic competition, causing China-US relations to fall into serious difficulties. This erroneous strategic perception is the root of all the problems in the relationship between the two countries. Recently, the American side has introduced a number of China-related restrictive measures that run counter to the momentum of China-US relations stabilising and improving, exposing a perceptual disconnect between some people on the American side and the new positioning of the relationship between the two countries.

History has repeatedly proved that, if one clings to the zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice and regards the other side as a rival, contradictions will proliferate in China-US relations. Taking strategic competition as the overall keynote of China policy is both a misreading of China’s development path and a misjudgment of the essence of the bilateral relationship; it both violates the expectations of the two peoples and deviates from the trend of the times. The new positioning is a positive response to the fundamental question of ‘whether China and the United States are, after all, rivals or partners,’ and explicitly rejects the erroneous logic of defining China-US relations through strategic competition. It is a reaffirmation, a reconsolidation and a reshaping of the future exploration of building a China-US relationship that is constructive, strategic and stable.”

构建中美建设性战略稳定关系，树立正确的战略认知是必须扣好的“第一粒纽扣”。认知出现偏差，行动就容易偏离正轨。长期以来，美方一些人固守冷战思维，将中国视为战略对手，鼓吹战略竞争叙事，导致中美关系陷入严重困难。这种错误的战略认知是两国关系一切问题的根源。近期，美方出台多项涉华限制性措施，与中美关系企稳向好的势头背道而驰，暴露出美方一些人同两国关系新定位之间的认知脱节。历史反复证明，固守零和博弈思维和意识形态偏见，把对方视为对手，中美关系就会矛盾丛生。把战略竞争当作对华政策总基调，既是对中国发展道路的误读，也是对双边关系本质的误判；既违背两国民意期待，也背离时代发展潮流。新定位是对“中美到底是对手还是伙伴”这一根本性问题的正面回应，明确拒绝了以战略竞争来定义中美关系的错误逻辑。这是对未来探索构建具有建设性、战略性、稳定性中美关系的再确认、再巩固、再塑造。

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“China and the US should be partners and friends. This is both the lesson of history and the requirement of reality. President Xi Jinping has profoundly pointed out that, looking across the course of the development of China-US relations, whether the two sides can achieve mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation is the key to whether the bilateral relationship can develop stably. Mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation are the valuable experiences distilled from more than half a century of China-US interaction. Standing at a new historical juncture, building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability fully accords with and is of the same lineage as this valuable experience.

Mutual respect is an important prerequisite for achieving constructive strategic stability between China and the US. China and the US have different national conditions, and contradictions and differences are difficult to avoid. The two sides should be good at seeking common ground, continuously enlarging the cake of common interests; they should also rationally reserve differences, fully accommodating each other’s legitimate concerns, so that competition is kept within bounds and differences are kept controllable. Since last year, multiple rounds of China-US economic and trade consultations have reached a series of positive outcomes, and ‘mutual respect’ has been written many times into the outcome consensus reached by the two sides’ economic and trade teams. Practice has proved that, as long as both sides uphold the spirit of equality, respect and mutual benefit and move towards each other, wisdom and methods for resolving differences can be found, laying a solid foundation for China-US relations and also creating a good environment for the respective development of the two countries.

Peaceful coexistence is the bottom line that the two major countries must firmly hold. Conflict and confrontation between China and the US would be an unbearable disaster for the two countries and even for the world. The key to achieving enduring stability, with peace to be anticipated, lies in abiding by the three China-US joint communiqués and respecting each other’s social systems, development paths, core interests and major concerns. The Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, path and system, and the right to development are China’s four red lines, which brook no challenge. These are the guardrails and safety net of China-US relations.

The Taiwan question is the most important question in China-US relations; pull one strand of hair and the whole body moves (牵一发而动全身).If it is handled properly, relations between the two countries can maintain overall stability. If it is not handled properly, the two countries could collide and even come into conflict, pushing the entire China-US relationship into an extremely dangerous situation. The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-US relations. ‘Taiwan independence’ is the common enemy of China and the US, and managing and controlling ‘Taiwan independence’ is a key link in China and the US building a relationship of constructive strategic stability. The American side must handle the Taiwan question with the utmost prudence, and use concrete actions to safeguard the stable development of China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

Win-win cooperation is the trend of the times, and also the underlying colour that China-US relations ought to preserve. That China and the US both benefit from cooperation and are both harmed by struggle is a plain truth repeatedly tested by practice. Every step forward in cooperation adds a measure of mutual trust, and the resilience of the relationship between the two countries is strengthened accordingly. This year is the opening year of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, and more than 1.4 billion Chinese people are comprehensively advancing Chinese-style modernization through high-quality development. This year is also the 250th anniversary of American independence, and more than 300 million American people are pushing America’s development towards a new journey. The Chinese side has always held that realising the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can entirely proceed in parallel without contradiction, achieve mutual success, and benefit the world.

Establishing correct strategic perceptions must ultimately land on concrete actions of keeping faith with the consensus. Upholding the spirit of mutual respect, firmly holding the bottom line of peaceful coexistence, and jointly creating prospects for win-win cooperation, China and the US should maintain the continuity and stability of their policies, and inject more confidence in peace, forces for stability and momentum for cooperation into the international community.”

中美应当做伙伴、做朋友，这是历史的启示，也是现实的要求。习近平主席深刻指出，纵观中美关系发展历程，能不能做到相互尊重、和平共处、合作共赢是双边关系能否稳定发展的关键所在。相互尊重、和平共处、合作共赢，是半个多世纪中美交往沉淀下来的宝贵经验。立足新的历史方位，构建中美建设性战略稳定关系，与这一宝贵经验完全契合、一脉相承。相互尊重，是实现中美建设性战略稳定的重要前提。中美国情不同，有矛盾分歧在所难免。双方要善于求同，不断做大共同利益蛋糕；也要理性存异，充分照顾彼此合理关切，让竞争有度、分歧可控。去年以来，中美多轮经贸磋商达成了一系列积极成果，“相互尊重”被多次写入双方经贸团队达成的成果共识。实践证明，只要秉持平等、尊重、互惠的精神相向而行，就可以找到解决分歧的智慧与办法，为中美关系打下一个稳固的基础，也为两国各自发展营造良好的环境。和平共处，是两个大国必须牢牢守住的底线。中美冲突对抗对两国乃至世界都将是难以承受的灾难。实现和平可期的持久稳定，关键在于遵守中美三个联合公报，尊重彼此社会制度、发展道路与核心利益和重大关切。台湾问题、民主人权、道路制度、发展权利是中方的4条红线，不容挑战。这些是中美关系的防护栏和安全网。台湾问题是中美关系中最重要的问题，牵一发而动全身。处理好了，两国关系就能保持总体稳定。处理不好，两国就会碰撞甚至冲突，将整个中美关系推向十分危险的境地。一个中国原则是中美关系的政治基础。“台独”是中美共同的敌人，管控“台独”是中美构建建设性战略稳定关系的关键一环。美方务必慎之又慎处理台湾问题，以实际行动维护中美关系的稳定发展以及台海和平稳定。合作共赢是时代潮流，也是中美关系理应葆有的底色。中美合则两利、斗则俱伤，是被实践反复检验的朴素真理。合作每向前推进一步，互信就增添一分，两国关系的韧性也随之增强。今年是中国“十五五”开局之年，14亿多中国人民正以高质量发展全面推进中国式现代化。今年也是美国独立250周年，3亿多美国人民正推动美国发展迈向新的征程。中方始终认为，实现中华民族伟大复兴和让美国再次伟大，完全可以并行不悖、相互成就、造福世界。树立正确战略认知，最终要落脚于信守共识的实际行动。秉持相互尊重的精神，守牢和平共处的底线，共创合作共赢的前景，中美双方应当维护政策的连续性稳定性，为国际社会注入更多和平底气、稳定力量与合作动能。

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The final section has a message for the wider world. It says:

“Building a China-US relationship of constructive strategic stability is in itself the provision to the world of an exceedingly precious public good. It will profoundly influence the evolution of the global balance of power and shape the future direction of the international order, with a powerful positive radiating effect.” 中美构建建设性战略稳定关系，本身就是向世界供给弥足珍贵的公共产品，将深刻影响全球力量格局演变、塑造未来国际秩序走向，具有强大的正面辐射效应。

“Benign interaction between China and the US both serves the two countries’ own development and lends strength to and escorts world economic growth. The two countries’ industries are deeply linked and their markets are enormous in scale and volume, so the spillover effects of bilateral interaction extend across the globe. In May this year, the Chinese and American economic and trade teams reached a series of consensuses on establishing a Trade Council and an Investment Council and on promoting the expansion of two-way trade under a framework of reciprocal tariff reductions; as soon as the news was announced, it served to stabilise global market expectations. Confidence is more precious than gold. Authoritative institutions such as the IMF generally hold that the easing of China-US relations is an important precondition for global economic recovery. China and the US carrying out constructive communication and cooperation, and maintaining the smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains, can inject valuable certainty into world economic recovery and create a more predictable external environment for the development of all countries.” 中美良性互动，既服务于两国自身发展，也为世界经济增长助力护航。两国产业深度联结、市场规模体量巨大，双边互动的溢出效应遍及全球。今年5月，中美经贸团队就成立贸易理事会和投资理事会、在对等降税框架下推动扩大双向贸易等达成系列共识，消息一经公布，便起到稳住全球市场预期的作用。信心比黄金更珍贵。国际货币基金组织等权威机构普遍认为，中美关系缓和是全球经济复苏的重要前提。中美开展建设性沟通合作，维护全球产业链供应链平稳运行，能够为世界经济复苏注入宝贵确定性，为各国发展创造更加可预期的外部环境.

“Looking around the world, regional conflicts are erupting one after another, while various security risks are overlapping and resonating with one another. The world needs strategic stability among major countries more than at any other time. Since 2025, facing a complex and volatile international security situation, China and the US have restored high-level military communication mechanisms, establishing an important channel for managing the risks of miscalculation at sea and in the regions concerned. In May this year, the Chinese and American heads of state exchanged views on major international and regional issues such as the situation in the Middle East, the Ukraine crisis and the Korean Peninsula. Major countries shoulder special responsibilities. China and the US should grasp the general trend of the times with a broad vision, properly handle regional hotspots with a great sense of responsibility, do more practical and good deeds in persuading towards peace and promoting talks, and strive to be a good source of stability for world peace.” 环顾全球，地区冲突此起彼伏，各类安全风险叠加共振，世界比任何时候都更需要大国之间的战略稳定。2025年以来，面对复杂多变的国际安全形势，中美恢复高层军事沟通机制，为管控海上及地区误判风险搭建重要渠道。今年5月，中美元首就中东局势、乌克兰危机、朝鲜半岛等重大国际和地区问题交换了意见。大国肩负特殊责任，中美应当以大格局把握时代大势，以大担当妥善处置地区热点，多做劝和促谈的实事好事，努力当好世界和平的稳定源.

“Coordination and cooperation between China and the US possess an irreplaceable leading value within the global governance system. From jointly responding to the impact of the international financial crisis to jointly addressing major public-health security challenges under the framework of the United Nations, China-US cooperation has on many occasions contributed solutions and strength to resolving global problems At present, the ‘four deficits’ of global peace, development, security and governance are intertwined and superimposed, requiring all the more coordinated action among major countries. China and the US will respectively host the 2026 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and the G20 Leaders’ Summit, with the two summits being held only a month apart, and the Chinese and American heads of state have already reached a consensus that they are ‘happy to see each other succeed.’ The ‘twin summits’ complement and illuminate each other, forming a historic linkage that will create favourable conditions for coordination between the two countries’ institutions. China and the US have many zones of shared understanding and points of cooperation on issues such as supply chains, energy and the digital economy. Deepening pragmatic coordination around these global issues will explore feasible paths for reforming and improving the global governance system.” 中美两国的协调合作，在全球治理体系当中具备不可替代的引领价值。从携手应对国际金融危机冲击，到在联合国框架下共同应对重大公共卫生安全挑战，中美协作曾经多次为破解全球性难题贡献方案与力量。当下，全球和平、发展、安全、治理“四大赤字”交织叠加，更需要大国开展协调行动。中美将分别主办2026年亚太经合组织领导人非正式会议与二十国集团领导人峰会，两场峰会仅隔一个月举行，中美元首已达成“乐见双方取得成功”的共识。“双峰会”交相辉映，形成历史性联动，将为两国机制协同创造利好条件。中美两国在供应链、能源、数字经济等议题上有很多共感带、合作点，双方围绕这些全球性议题深化务实协调，将为改革完善全球治理体系探索可行路径.

“A new wave of scientific and technological revolution is surging forward, while the opportunities and risks of AI are emerging simultaneously, becoming a new proposition confronting all of humanity. As two globally leading major powers in AI, China and the US, by strengthening communication and dialogue and building consensus, can promote AI toward positive and beneficial ends and bring benefits to humanity. This is both what should properly be done to implement the consensus reached by the two heads of state and something that can provide an important reference for global digital governance. The two sides should make good use of the intergovernmental dialogue mechanism on artificial intelligence, give play to the constructive role of the business community as the main force driving AI innovation, break through technological, market, and industrial barriers, unleash the innovative dynamism enabled by two-way cooperation, and make AI a new frontier of China-US cooperation and a new ladder for human innovation and development.” 新一轮科技革命浪潮奔涌向前，人工智能的机遇与风险同步凸显，成为摆在全人类面前的崭新命题。中美作为全球领先的人工智能大国，加强沟通对话、凝聚共识，推动人工智能向上向善、造福人类，既是落实两国元首共识的应有之义，也能够为全球数字治理提供重要参考。双方要用好人工智能政府间对话机制，发挥工商界作为人工智能创新主力军的建设性作用，打通技术、市场、产业壁垒，释放双向合作赋能的创新动力，让人工智能成为中美合作的新疆域、人类创新发展的新阶梯.

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Also on the page is a report (English report) on Vice President Han Zheng meeting with Australia’s Speaker of the House of Representatives Milton Dick in Beijing on Monday; another report (English report) on Ding Xuexiang meeting with a delegation of young representatives from flag-raising teams in Hong Kong and Macao schools at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing; and Wang Huning meeting with (English report) Ahmad Muzani, speaker of Indonesia’s People’s Consultative Assembly in Beijing.

Page 2: There’s a report on the China-US talks in New York. The article says that:

“With the important consensus of the two heads of state as guidance, and upholding the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, the two sides conducted candid, in-depth and constructive exchanges on important economic and trade issues of common concern to both sides, such as implementing the consensus of previous rounds of economic and trade consultations and promoting bilateral trade and investment, and held a dialogue on issues related to artificial intelligence.” 当地时间9月20日，中美经贸中方牵头人、国务院副总理何立峰与美方牵头人、美国财政部长贝森特和贸易代表格里尔在美国纽约举行经贸磋商。双方以两国元首重要共识为引领，秉持相互尊重、和平共处、合作共赢的原则，围绕落实历次经贸磋商共识、促进双边贸易投资等双方共同关心的重要经贸问题，进行了坦诚、深入、富有建设性的交流，并就人工智能有关问题举行对话.

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Also on the page is a report on Wang Yi’s call with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul. The report says:

“Wang Yi said that China and Germany are major world economies and all-round strategic partners. Facing the current shocks of unilateralism and de-globalisation, it is necessary for the two sides to strengthen strategic communication, enhance mutual trust, deepen practical cooperation, send a positive signal of China and Germany jointly upholding multilateralism and free trade, boost outside confidence in the development of China-Germany relations, and also play a constructive role in the development of China-EU relations. Strengthening mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Germany accords with the interests of both sides and is the correct common choice. We should cherish the progress achieved so far, and push China-Germany cooperation to go deeper and more solid, continuously achieving new results.” 王毅表示，中德是世界主要经济体和全方位战略伙伴，面对当前单边主义和逆全球化冲击，双方有必要加强战略沟通，增进彼此互信，深化务实合作，释放中德共同维护多边主义和自由贸易的积极信号，增强外界对中德关系发展的信心，也为中欧关系发展起到建设性作用。加强中德互利合作符合双方利益，是正确的共同选择。我们要珍惜迄今取得的进展，推动中德合作走深走实，不断取得新的成果.

“Wang Yi pointed out that the one-China principle is the political foundation of China-Germany relations. China hopes that the German side will cherish and consolidate the mutual trust and tradition of friendship between China and Germany, strictly abide by the one-China principle, use concrete actions to safeguard China-Germany relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and create the necessary conditions for high-level exchanges between the two sides. China and the European Union are comprehensive strategic partners, and China and Europe should not fight a trade war. The Chinese side has consistently advocated that the two sides move towards each other and find ways to resolve each other’s concerns through dialogue and consultation. China hopes that Germany will maintain a rational and pragmatic attitude, play a positive role within the EU, and push the EU to adhere to free trade, abandon protectionism, and hold to the right path of open cooperation and dialogue and consultation.” 王毅指出，一个中国原则是中德关系的政治基础。希望德方珍惜和巩固中德互信和友好传统，恪守一个中国原则，以实际行动维护中德关系和台海和平稳定，为双方高层交往营造必要条件。中国和欧盟是全面战略伙伴，中欧不应打贸易战。中方一贯主张双方相向而行，通过对话协商找到解决彼此关切的办法。希望德国保持理性、务实态度，在欧盟内发挥积极作用，推动欧盟坚持自由贸易，摒弃保护主义，坚持开放合作和对话协商的正道.

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—RSJ

There are two scenes from Hindi cinema that I go back to when I think about charisma. The first is from Vijay Anand’s Guide, based on R.K. Narayan’s novel of the same name. Raju Guide (Dev Anand) has just finished his prison term and he walks away into the yonder (with Dada Burman singing Wahan Kaun Hai Tera Musafir in the background). He falls in with a group of sadhus and reaches a small village where he spends the night in a temple courtyard. In the morning, the sadhus depart, and one of them puts his religious shawl over the sleeping Raju. A villager arrives, sees the man in the shawl and mistakes him for a holy man. From there, the story takes on a life of its own. Villagers begin attributing qualities to Raju that he never claimed to possess. He could cure things, solve problems, perhaps perform miracles. Soon the village is facing a drought, the villagers believe that if Raju fasts for twelve days, the rains will come. He does, he dies, and the rain arrives.

The other scene is from Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar, a thinly veiled version of the birth of the Dravidian movement and the lives of MGR and Karunanidhi. Annadurai is on his deathbed and the question is who will inherit the movement. Karunanidhi (or his likeness, played on screen by Prakash Raj), the firebrand poet whose words have roused the masses, assumes that the answer is obvious. He has put in the hard yards for the ideology. MGR (a mesmerising Mohanlal on screen), is a star who is on the ascendant and who has been brought into the political fold because his friend Karunanidhi and Annadurai see something in his popularity. Annadurai chooses MGR and a disappointed Karunanidhi takes MGR with him onto a terrace where a crowd is waiting below. MGR is unsure of what to do. Karunanidhi raises MGR’s hand upwards to the sky. The crowd erupts. What is interesting is MGR’s face. Until that moment, he knows he is popular. In that moment, he sees something else. He sees what the crowd sees in him. He eases, waves at the crowd and soon has them in his thrall.

That’s the one defining thing about charisma. It lies in the eyes of the beholder. Weber, who wrote extensively about charisma more than a century ago, defined it in a similar vein. Charisma is a quality attributed to an individual who is regarded as possessing exceptional, even superhuman, qualities. What matters sociologically is not whether those qualities exist but how followers perceive them. Recognition is the key here.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that charismatic people do not know they possess it to begin with. The attribution comes first, and the consciousness of it comes later. A crowd of followers sustain it till the person starts understanding the crowd’s belief and begins to act within that space. Both Raju Guide and MGR were instances of this.

Charisma fills a vacuum in a society. Its need isn’t felt in a milieu that is comfortable with its existing arrangements. It appears when there is a felt need for change, a crisis, or a moment when extant institutional mechanisms appear inadequate. People begin looking for a leader who can do something beyond the normal course. Weber called it the mission of the leader. The leader’s claim succeeds so long as the followers recognise the mission and the leader continues to prove himself. As Weber put it, the charismatic claim breaks down when the mission is no longer recognised.

I am thinking of charisma again as I take in the events of the last few days. PM Modi turned 76 this week, and the BJP used the occasion to mark his 25 years in public life. The party organised the Aashirwad Ka Diya campaign, with lamp-lighting events across the country, alongside a month-long Seva Sankalp Abhiyan. The BJP has a certain genius for these things, and PM Modi has often turned the mundane into something extraordinary (remember the thali-banging people did to drive Coronavirus).

I was out and about on the evening of Sep 17, and I barely saw a diya lit at the homes of people. That didn’t stop the sycophancy of the mainstream media or the competitive spectacle around the country with ministers, CMs and random BJP functionaries participating in increasingly elaborate displays of Modi bhakti. PM Modi later thanked people for the gesture and said it had deeply touched him. But this didn’t generate the passion of similar Modi symbolism of the past. There were significantly more negative comments on social media about these displays and the increasingly cringe content put up in trying to keep up with Gen Z.

As the BJP and PM Modi will realise, you cannot organise charisma. A rally, an inauguration or a song can be created to gather the masses. But the thing that makes a leader charismatic is the spontaneous attribution of qualities by the followers. Once you try to manufacture the evidence of that attribution, you have already lost charisma.

So, what has changed?

In edition #86, I had written about the origin of Modi’s charisma. Back in 2013-14, two different anxieties within the electorate came together. There was the accumulated frustration with the performance of UPA 2, with corruption and policy paralysis. There was also a cultural discomfort among a section of the majority with the way the Indian state had evolved, particularly around questions of Hindu identity, secularism and nationhood. This was both real and imagined, like most things. The two things had different origins, but they converged politically.

Modi, through a coming together of happenstance and deliberate actions, became the person into whom both these could be projected. With the combination of “Gujarat model” and Hindu hridyasamrat woven into his persona, he came to embody the possibility of a different India. There was some track record of performance (not directly experienced by most people outside of Gujarat) and a sense of mystique that has long followed public personalities in India who don’t have a family. This allowed a wide spectrum of people to pour their aspirations, grievances and hopes for the future into him.

For the last decade, that charisma has allowed PM Modi to transcend the usual metrics by which governments are usually judged. A report card of all the promises made just in his Independence Day speeches over the years and the actual performance on those will make his delivery record clear for anyone interested. The government could be criticised on roti, kapda and makaan issues and still retain the ability to say that it was changing the country in a more fundamental way. The construction of the Ram temple, the revocation of Article 370, changes in history books, CAA et al. became markers of that change for his supporters. Each such act provided another proof of the original mission and so the charisma sustained. It created, to borrow a term used for Steve Jobs, a reality-distortion field around him. Failures that would ordinarily damage a government like demonetisation, COVID-19 response, unemployment, were absorbed because the follower was judging him against a larger mission.

However, as we are seeing, there seems to be an expiry date to this. The charismatic leader captures the institutions that he originally promised to transform and, in time, becomes the establishment. The outsider has to live with the compromises of being inside. They can move people initially by promising to break through the constraints that have held society back. Once in office, however, they encounter a thousand frictions, small and big, of governing a country. The distance between promise and lived reality begins to matter.

As I said, the BJP and PM Modi have managed this tension for a long time because they have a political imagination larger than mere economic performance. Cultural solutions have continued to provide a sense of movement and purpose to its core base. But there is a limit to how many times the same political manoeuvre might invoke the desired passions. In fact, every completed cultural goal removes one element of the original need for a change agent. It is a naturally shrinking base, and the possibility is that the erosion may happen well before the political consequences become visible.

That is where PM Modi is today. I would hesitate to say that his electoral power has dissipated. The BJP has built a formidable electoral organisation through means fair and foul. It retains a remarkable ability to mobilise political passion around cultural and national questions. A decline in personal charisma does not automatically translate into electoral defeat. But as I said, the political consequences are the lagging indicator here. For more than a decade, PM Modi has had an ability to make people believe that something larger was about to happen, that the country was on the cusp of a different future and that he personally embodied that future. The shifting of that goalpost from this decade to 2047 (Viksit Bharat) tells you about the difficulty in keeping that promise in the short run.

There is also the problem of what or who after PM Modi?

S.N. Eisenstadt, in his introduction to Weber’s On Charisma and Institution Building, makes this point: the real test of a charismatic leader is whether the leader can leave a continuing imprint on institutional structures and infuse them with something of the original vision.

A movement built around a person has to become institutionalised for it to last. The political movement has to decide how authority is transferred so that the original mission survives the individual who embodied it. Nehru, for all the blame he takes these days, understood this problem. His political personality became embedded in institutions that continued after him. Modi has built an extraordinary personal political machine, but the question of how his charisma survives him is harder to answer.

The beginning of the end of a charismatic era won’t be an electoral defeat. It will take the shape of memes, jokes, frustration or worse, boredom. The leader will then try extra hard to generate an emotional response, which will further take away the original mystique. Because once the crowd stops attributing something extraordinary, no amount of coaxing them to see it the old way is likely to work.

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Matsyanyaaya: Sanctioning Russia India Act of 2026

Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action

—Pranay Kotasthane

Last week, the “Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026” was signed into law, giving the US President discretion, amongst other things, to impose tariffs on large buyers of Russian gas and oil. The point of relevance to India is this:

“The President must also increase the rate of duty up to 100% ad valorem (i.e., relative to the value) on all goods imported into the United States from a country that was among the five largest importers of Russian-origin crude oil or natural gas if such country knowingly makes new purchases of such products after enactment of the bill.”

This introduces another roadblock in the troubled India-US relationship. But before we go there, it’s useful to reflect on the origins of the Act. The bill found bipartisan consensus in the US Congress, where lawmakers want to support Ukraine by punishing some countries that buy oil and gas from Russia. I say “some” because it exempts European countries that continue to buy Russian natural gas in a roundabout way. It says that if any country’s natural gas imports from Russia in the last year were less than 15 per cent of Russia’s total exports of natural gas, that country will not incur tariffs. So you can be a small European country that buys 100 per cent of its natural gas from Russia and still be exempt, while a large country like India, which buys large absolute quantities of Russian crude, gets trapped.

After the bill was passed by Congress, Senator Blumenthal’s warning, “To China and India, clean up your act; buy your oil from somewhere else", will be remembered for a long time in India. It’s ironic that he’s asking others to buy oil elsewhere when the US’ sloppy war in West Asia has raised oil prices for everyone worldwide. And then, to punish a country that had nothing to do with the Ukraine-Russia war, while the US and its allies couldn’t resist the Russian invasion, is tone-deafness illustrated.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s latest Indian Express column puts the much-feted US political system’s checks and balances under the scanner:

The US, in contravention of all international decency, claims the authority to punish any third country that had no role in starting the war, that is not consulted in the conduct of the war, and bears the collateral costs of the war. But it leaves the US and its own conduct of actual war outside of the framework of any accountability. The Bill seeks to preserve exemptions for the US’s imports of low-enriched uranium, as if the US cannot bear the cost of those import restrictions, while poor countries around the world are expected to put up with rising energy costs. There is a kind of shamelessness here that is astonishing. But the Europeans have been equally selective in where they seek to apply principles of international law, privileging the war in Ukraine over other wars, including Iran….

The Graham Bill is nothing but a legislative imprimatur on this arrogance of power. But it is also deeply delusional. It displays the classic mistake of thinking that America can, in the final analysis, determine the political choices of large countries. Ukraine and Iran have shown why the practice of sovereignty still matters. The US will not achieve global stability by arm-twisting major powers like China and India through the threat of sanctions. If anything, Congress should be censuring Trump for his failures. It would also do well to remember Fulbright’s words: “When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.” [Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Indian Express]

But then again, this is just another demonstration of how international affairs operate on matsyanyaaya. Ironies, moral inconsistencies, and hypocrisies are the default, not exceptions. The only way to respond is to demonstrate one’s own leverage selectively, as I argued in edition #348. Over the past few weeks, we refined India’s leverage framework further, and it’s time that India considers some of these options. What follows is an extract from a Takshashila paper by Lokendra Sharma and me, discussing India’s coercive options against Washington.

New Delhi should act against Washington where vulnerability is highly asymmetric (the US must be more exposed than India in the specific domain in which the latter is instituting measures) and where the action has high political salience for the US (it needs to generate domestic political pain in the target state). The quadrant that represents this intersection in the 2x2 matrix above is the sweet spot. It includes the following leverage options:

• Altering defence procurement approach: India is a significant external buyer of military hardware produced by US defence contractors. A 2014 Financial Times report (quoting research from IHS Jane) indicated that India was the biggest buyer of US weapons in 2013, with the number pegged at $1.9 billion. A more recent report by Alan K. Kronstadt for the Congressional Research Service (US) states that India’s defence purchases from the US amounted to USD 25 billion in nearly the last two decades. “India is now the largest operator of C-17 Globemaster heavy transport and P-8I Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft outside of the United States,” according to the report. Any public announcement by India about finding alternate suppliers for big-ticket (with contracts running into billions of dollars) defence purchases would be costly for the US defence contractors. Given how enmeshed these contractors are in the US polity, with decades of lobbying experience and extensive ties to congressional delegations, they will channelise their grievances to the US Congress/administration, thereby providing one impetus for policy change vis-à-vis India. It helps India’s case that New Delhi has credible alternatives in European and domestic suppliers that can fill in for the US contractors. Another advantage of this leverage option is that it is reversible to some extent, as the hitherto sidelined US defence contractors can be engaged in future procurement cycles.

• SAMR-style regulator in India: Taking a leaf out of China’s playbook, India should establish an equivalent of the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) to weaponise market access for exercising leverage over countries hosting the targeted entities. China has used the SAMR instrument to target mergers and acquisitions even in cases when neither of the entities is Chinese but generates revenues from the latter’s market. As one of us (Pranay) has argued in a Takshashila blog post, “SAMR has repeatedly used its merger review process to extract concessions, protect domestic industries, force technology transfers to a third-party Chinese player, or signal political displeasure.”¹⁸ This includes blocking Intel’s acquisition of Tower Semiconductor and delaying Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Other investigations undertaken by SAMR include Qualcomm - Autotalks, DuPont - Rogers Corp, and Microsoft - Activision. While the per capita income varies, India is also a significant market with potential for future growth for the US companies, especially the Big Tech companies dabbling in e-commerce, social media, payments and cloud. An Indian SAMR-equivalent institution targeting the mergers and acquisitions of US companies will send a calibrated signal to US companies, which can then channelise the same to the US government.

• Delay the trade deal: Although the US and India agreed to a framework deal earlier this year, they are yet to sign a proper, comprehensive trade agreement. There are multiple reasons to delay the trade deal. First, the domestic polarisation in the US polity. As one of us (Lokendra) has argued previously in a Moneycontrol opinion piece on the India-US interim trade deal: “An unfavourable mid-term result may strengthen the US Congress’ exercise of powers over taxation and tariffs, likely leading to a reduction of Trump’s leverage in negotiations with India.” Further, reaching any agreement with the Trump administration does not prevent Trump from threatening more tariffs. For example, about a year after the US announced a deal with the EU, Trump has threatened 100 per cent tariffs over digital services taxes. There is a reason why we have not seen major headlines about a new “massive” trade deal that the US has reached after the US Supreme Court struck down the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), 1977, by the executive for imposing tariffs. Second, any trade deal must ensure that India enjoys a comparative advantage vis-à-vis other countries in the region and beyond that export a similar set of goods to the US (apparel, for instance). In this regard, the statement by India’s commerce minister that there has to be a comparative advantage for the country for any trade deal to fructify is a welcome one. With IEEPA ruled out and the usage of other legal tools such as sections 122, 232 and 301 muddied, India should wait for clarity to emerge on the US side before proceeding with a trade deal. But there is also a third reason, and clubbed with effective communication, it can be used to send a signal to Washington that transgressions would be met with a further delay in signing the trade deal and a continuation of the status quo. The outlawing of IEEPA-based tariffs has meant that the US executive is unlikely to impose discretionary tariffs on a range of countries in the way they did for much of 2025. Because affected countries are no longer trying to outdo each other in a race-to-the-bottom to please the US executive with deal offers, this also reduces the urgency for India to secure a trade deal.

Apart from the sweet spot quadrant, the other three quadrants are slow burn (high asymmetry but low political salience), deterrence shelf (low asymmetry but high political salience) and finally the dead zone (both asymmetry and political salience being low). The slow burn quadrant will include leverage measures such as freezing the implementation of foundational defence agreements that India has with the US, like the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA). This will also include cancelling joint military exercises between both countries. These actions will affect the force projection capabilities of the US in the Indian Ocean region, but would not generate the political consternation that targeting of stakeholders with strong political lobbying groups would (as discussed above). The deterrence shelf includes targeting of global capability centres that India houses. There are over 2100 GCCs in the country, serving as R&D centres for some of the largest American firms. This is a low-asymmetry option, as India is significantly exposed if its actions affect GCC functioning. The introduction of regulatory uncertainty around GCCs, instead of extreme measures, would be sufficient to send a signal to the US companies and their lobbies interfacing with the US government. Finally, the dead zone has measures that India should not take, as they neither have political salience nor high exposure for the US. This includes symbolic recalls of diplomatic staff, cultural boycotts (such as that of Hollywood offerings) and targeting sectors where India is more exposed than the US.

…

It is not our argument that any of these are good options in that they would not carry any consequences for India. All of them are bad options in normal times. But given the difficult moment India finds itself in from a geopolitical point of view, the leverage options we suggest can potentially work today in influencing the behaviour of the major powers. India should double down on the long-term path of ensuring economic and technological prosperity for its people in addition to building military strength. But when faced with transgressions, it should not wait for a future moment of strength to respond when leverage options can be exercised today.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [YouTube Show] In the previous edition, I discussed the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident. In the latest episode of Watching the Wheels, we took that conversation forward, with talking about her new agentic AI governance framework.

2. [Article] To make sense of the UPI MDR debate, check out this opinion piece by .

3. [Book] This collection of chapters on the Geopolitics of AI is a great read. It’s written from an American perspective, but has several important ideas for discussion. And it’s available for free.

This newsletter is curated by Anwesha Sen.

Every month, I score ten things on a 0-10 scale to assess whether the gap between the current developments in nuclear fusion and a time when fusion can be commercially deployed is narrowing. In August 2026, nothing moved. That is the honest answer, despite headline news that Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) raised $1 billion and China successfully tested the largest fusion magnet ever built, since the physics did not budge.

For a more detailed view of the dashboard, check out our August 2026 Fusion Gap Report.

The scores move only on a physical demonstration or a legal decision, not on funding rounds or press releases. The three lowest scores - material science, tritium, heat conversion - are the reason my best estimate for a first grid-connected fusion plant remains the late 2030s, not the 2028 that Helium has promised Microsoft.

Where AI actually fits

Fusion’s AI story is often regarded as hype. I think there is something real, but narrow. Plasma disruptions happen in milliseconds and are too fast for human operators to react. DeepMind is building the TORAX simulator, and its reinforcement learning “pilot” is being built to fly CFS’s SPARC tokamak. Thea Energy announced a stellarator digital twin with NVIDIA, Argonne, and Princeton in August 2026. AI is compressing thousands of simulated operating scenarios into a control policy before expensive hardware is switched on.

However, the needles on the three lowest scores are not being moved by AI. AI cannot test a steel against fourteen years of neutron bombardment, breed tritium, or convert heat into electricity. Those need facilities which in turn need patient capital.

Enter Pranos

That framing matters for India, because in August 2026, a Bengaluru startup did something India’s private sector had never done before. It built a tokamak. Pranos Fusion has eight people, was founded only in 2024, raised $7,2 million, and unveiled PRAGYA, a low-aspect ratio tokamak incubated at JNCASR with the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR).

While this is a milestone for Pranos, it is important to note that PRAGYA is small, with a 0.4m major radius, a 0.1 tesla field and 25 kiloamperes of plasma current. IPR’s own ADITYA-U tokamak is roughly twice the size and fifteen times the field. In contrast, CFS’s SPARC will run at 12 tesla. There is no announcement that Pranos has achieved first plasma.

Still, the interesting part of Pranos is not the tokamak. It is JENGA, its digital twin and plasma control platform, and MAGGA, its HTS magnet line. Those are the two places on my scoreboard - control and magnets - where the global frontier is already close to being solved, and where an entrant with software talent and partners with manufacturing heft can plausibly play.

India’s problem is not talent. It is the absence of a mission and an ambition.

India is an early member of ITER. Larsen & Toubro built ITER’s 3,850-tonne cryostat. IPR has run tokamaks since 1989 with ADITYA. Yet, India’s scores on every axis sit between 1-4, with its only respectable score in the supply chain.

The gap is institutional. IPR’s own roadmap released last September targets a fusion-fission hybrid (SST-Barat: 130 MW, of which 30 MW fusion, at an estimated cost of Rs.25,000 crore) and a demonstration reactor in 2060. A 2060 target is a decision to arrive at the table after the industry has been shaped by others.

The contrast with fission could not be more stark. The SHANTI Act ended NPCIL’s monopoly, allowing private companies to build and operate reactors. There are dated deliverables. Fusion got a definition and a committee. It exempts bench-scale fusion research from central licences. The seven-member committee is drafting a deployment roadmap. It has yet to have dated deliverables and a line item.

My argument is that India should do for fusion what it did for launch vehicles: create a mission with a public anchor, a dated goal, and a deliberate on-ramp for private firms. Here are three things it could do.

1. Pull SST-Bharat forward and open it to private sector participation. Commit to a build decision by 2028, not a demonstration in 2060. Seek private sector collaboration from day one.

2. Build the two facilities the world lacks. India cannot lead on net energy gain. It can fill the boring gaps. Build a fusion-relevant neutron test facility and tritium breeding testbed. These will cost thousands of crores, not lakhs of crores, and both would make India the place where fusion companies must come to test.

3. Take fusion out of the fission licence. The draft SHANTI rules put a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor under the same licence as a fission reactor - the opposite of what the US, the UK, and Germany have decided.

Yes, fusion is a 2040s technology at best; India’s energy transition is a 2030s problem, and Rs. 25,000 crores can buy a great deal of solar, storage and SMR capacity. Yet, this is a technology that will provide India a competitive edge it needs in decades to come. India missed the manufacturing bus; it is fighting today for a place in the semiconductor supply chain, and it is wondering what its role might be in AI. If it does not support this today, two decades from now it will rue the missed opportunity in nuclear fusion.

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The politics of the current age are of technology, for technology, and increasingly, by technology. Technology is at the centre of national power, economic growth, and societal change. This raises important questions for all of us:

• What will it take to strengthen India’s own research and development ecosystem?

• How can we build technology responsibly and anticipate its unintended consequences?

• Why are technology and national power increasingly part of the same conversation?

The Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Tech and Policy) programme is designed to help participants answer these questions. Participants will gain the skills and frameworks to create technology responsibly, advancing the public interest alongside business interests.

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And before you go-

Check out Grammar of War, a newsletter by Adya Madhavan, that looks at advanced military technologies!

But the important question to ideate upon is: if India had every GPU it needed tomorrow, then would it have achieved AI sovereignty, which seems to be the main goal of all this?

It is obvious that modern AI needs a lot of computational power, but there are other factors too which are part of the system that will lead to the goal being achieved. So, India’s real challenge is not just to have more chips. It is to build an AI stack that can turn computing power into useful, affordable, and sovereign capability. A bit of a deep dive into the AI system shows that it has several layers, like electricity, data centres, networking, computing hardware, data, models, model adaptation, and then the application and, at the end, delivery to users.

And this same understanding is broadly reflected by the India AI Mission, and its architecture is beyond compute so as to include our own foundation models, datasets, applications, talent, startup financing, and reliable, trusted AI with safety. Following up on this, as of 2026, official figures put the India AI Compute portal at more than 38,000 GPUs alongside 1,050 TPUs, giving cloud-based compute access to researchers, startups, MSMEs, academia, and other eligible users. So, it’s a sequential pipeline in which a GPU needs a data centre to operate, electricity to power it, networks to connect it, models and data to run on it, and then users and, most importantly, applications capable of delivering value to citizens and businesses.

Now the main question is: which part of this AI stack should India own, which should it control, which should it secure, and where can it rely on others?

The least visible layer of the AI stack is electricity, which might become one of the biggest constraints. Data centres need a lot of electricity, and obviously, AI is increasing that demand. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data-centre electricity consumption could roughly double from 405 TWh in 2025 to around 950 TWh by 2030, mainly because data centres are growing even faster.

So, India’s AI strategy cannot separate semiconductor policy from energy and infrastructure policy. A thousand additional GPUs are useful only if the base is there to run them, which is physical infrastructure. For reducing strategic dependency, a semiconductor push is required. We are building capabilities in chip design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing. However, advanced AI chips still depend on complex global supply chains and technologies that require high specialization.

India’s main focus should be on developing indigenous models, mainly because language, culture, and domain-specific needs create strategic value. And that is what is being supported by the IndiaAI Mission by using Indian datasets and custom sectors such as healthcare, education, agriculture, climate, etc. But sovereignty does not require India to reproduce every frontier model developed in the US and China. So, instead of training a foundational model from scratch, open and accessible models can be fine-tuned for use cases that matter to India’s users.

India has a high stake in the high demand for AI for several use cases, and this gap is an opportunity for a lot of emerging startups as well. So, India’s strength may not be in building the world’s largest AI models but in using them at scale. And the aligned advantage which India has is the technology workforce, a growing AI ecosystem, and platforms like UPI and Aadhaar, which show that India can build and deliver digital services to millions of people.

For every layer which I discussed earlier, India should therefore ask four questions: Can we control it? Can we access it reliably? Can we substitute it if geopolitical conditions change? Can we deploy it at national scale? And the answers will differ for each layer.

In conclusion, India’s AI challenge is therefore not a choice between building chips and leaving other layers untouched. It should be: which parts of the AI stack must India control, which can it access through trusted partners, and which are the niche areas that the rest of the world cannot copy.

As of this week, Houthi sources effectively control much of Yemen’s coastline in the Red Sea. They now control Mocha and Dhubab along the coastline, as well as the island of Mayyun, which sits inside the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait. In an escalation against Saudi Arabia, the Houthis have declared a blockade against Saudi shipping, and have expressed that they are more than willing to use their position to interdict traffic through the strait. Although Bab Al-Mandeb may not be ‘closed’ in the way that Hormuz is, its closure is more a question of whether the Houthis will follow through on threats that they are positioned to make, than a distant contingency. The potential closure of Bab Al-Mandeb is likely to be even more effective given the fact that Iran already controls shipping through Hormuz, which has forced Saudi Arabia to look to the Red Sea for its crude oil exports. If the Houthis were to continue to tighten their control, the impact will be felt beyond just Riyadh.

The strait (pictured above) runs between Yemen and Djibouti at its narrowest point. Because of the Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), shipping lanes run close to Yemen’s coast and islands as they pass through the area.

Post-Hormuz, at one point, as many as 4.5 million barrels of crude from Saudi Arabia were flowing through Bab Al-Mandeb. In August, this number reduced to about 2.5 million barrels a day, according to some reports, and is likely to have fallen even further as tensions continue to ramp up. The key factor that sets this time around apart from 2023-24, is that disruptions in Bab Al-Mandeb are no longer isolated, and only compound pre-existing chokepoint disruptions.

Currently, the restrictions in the strait are primarily targeted at Saudi Arabia. However, if the Houthis were to decide to impose more restrictions on commercial international shipping in general, the effects are likely to have implications that are more far-reaching.

If the strait were to have stringent controls imposed, in the immediate term there would have to be mass rerouting through the Cape of Good Hope. That would mean increased travel time and consequently an increase in the fuel costs per journey. According to some estimates, it would add between ten and fourteen days to the overall travel time. The uncertainty through Bab Al-Mandeb would also cause war-risk insurance premiums to increase, which could deter shipping companies from traversing through the route all together. These two factors could cause oil prices to rise.

In the longer term, the consolidation of the Houthis’ leverage in Bab Al-Mandeb along with Iran’s control over Hormuz, is likely to give Tehran a much greater lever. Although many argue that the Houthis do what benefits them, this will allow Iran to use the added economic pressure on global shipping to negotiate.

Additionally, if Saudi Arabia loses access to the Red Sea route in addition to Hormuz, they will be forced to try and find a solution. Either, they would have to broker a deal with either Iran or the Houthis, or they would have to escalate militarily.

As tensions in West Asia have snowballed from the October 7 attacks and the following genocide in Palestine to the war on Iran and now the broader regional conflict, lasting peace hangs in the balance with many, many different players and factors vying for their own interests. Whether the Saudis choose to escalate further with US involvement or support from the other parties of the Mecca Pact is likely to be critical to how the conflict plays out.

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It took genetic analysis, with other researchers and many more years to understand what she had stumbled upon. It was not a tigrina. A study published on 17 September introduced the world to a new feline species, *Leopardus tilcayo*, named after what local people called the animal. The discovery stamps a significant scientific milestone – it is the first new wildcat species to be formally described in more than a century, since the last was identified in 1923.

The genetic analysis, conducted on 38 cats from museum collections and the field, also revealed that what scientists had long treated as a single, adaptable species, the tiger cat, is actually five distinct species. Some of these lineages diverged as far as 1.4 million years ago.

Finding Leopardus tilcayo matters for more than just adding another cat to the catalogue of the natural world. The discovery exposes the limits of the map itself. Therefore, it could be said that the real value of the breakthrough remains granularity. That same granularity can be useful in understanding great powers in the world, as it is for reading cats. Pranay Kotasthane, Takshashila’s deputy director and chair of its High-Tech Geopolitics Programme, and Lokendra Sharma, a staff research analyst with the same programme, make a version of this case in their new paper, Does India Have Leverage Against the US and China? They argue that India, irrespective of its size or economy, has some leverage that it can bring to bear today. It offers precise, select areas where India can impose costs on either of the major powers.

For a more fulsome read of their analysis, follow this link.

SHANTI Act: Policy Advisory from Takshashila

In August 2026, the Department of Atomic Energy put its draft SHANTI Rules and Regulations out for public consultation, following the SHANTI Act passed in December 2025. The Takshashila Institution responded with three inputs on how the proposed framework could work better in practice.

You can get a complete policy advisory, here.

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What can India actually use BRICS for? Amit, Anushka weigh in…

Much of the commentary around this year’s BRICS summit focused on de-dollarisation and geopolitical positioning. In their The Hindu piece, ‘At BRICS, India must bank on the NDB’, Staff Research Analyst Amit Kumar and Associate Fellow Anushka Saxena look instead at a more tangible instrument, the New Development Bank (NDB).

“Much of the commentary around this year’s BRICS summit focused on de-dollarisation and geopolitical positioning. In their The Hindu piece, ‘At BRICS, India must bank on the NDB’, Staff Research Analyst Amit Kumar and Associate Fellow Anushka Saxena look instead at a more tangible instrument — the New Development Bank (NDB).”

To read this insightful piece, follow the link here.

PGP in Session

Diverse perspectives, sharp insights and a whole lot of fun at the PGP 10 Delhi Workshop! From Legislative Reform to the Future of Indian Democracy, Diplomacy and Media and to Health and Climate Policy - we covered a lot of ground!

The PGP is Takshashila’s 48-weekend hybrid public policy program, offers a multidisciplinary curriculum delivered through webinars on Saturdays and in-person workshops across India. It balances academic learning with policy simulations and provides exclusive access to Takshashila’s experts and alumni network.

Want to be a part of this? Explore the PGP today, follow the link here

ATP of the Week: Laughs and SCO-ffs At Bishkek

In this episode of All Things Policy, Anisree Suresh sits with Manoj Kewalramani and Anushka Saxena to unpack the 26th SCO Summit. They analyse the key takeaways from the Summit and its Bishkek Declaration, the utility of the Organisation itself from an Indian perspective, and its wider impact on regional security and cooperation.

To tune in to this interesting conversation, follow the link, here. Our daily podcast is available on all major podcast platforms, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Takshashila Tabletop Trove!

For our regular readers, you know of course that this section of Dispatch is intended to be a digital repository of the books that sit in Takshashila’s physical office space in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

This week’s theme is: ‘Ground Zero: Disasters and their Making,’ curated by an Anonymous Benefactor at the office.

1. Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine (Omer Bartov)

2. The Meaning of Nuclear Revolution (Robert Jervis)

3. There is No Planet B (Mike Berners-Lee)

4. Partition (Barney White-Spunner)

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Newsletter Feature

Instead of a Trivia Titbit this week, let me point you to a great read from one of our newsletters, Tracking People’s Daily. In this edition, Manoj Kewalramani, Chairperson of the Geostrategy Programme, analyses the Modi–Xi meeting in Delhi and the BRICS Declaration. Get the full piece here.

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That’s all from me, thank you readers. See you next week!

This edition of the Dispatch was written by Aishwaria Sonavane, Research Analyst for Pakistan Studies, Geostrategy Programme.

Page 1: Let’s begin with the report on Xi’s letter to a primary-level police force from Zhangzhou, Fujian Province. Xinhua says: “In his letter to the ‘Zhangzhou 110’ police unit, Xi lauded its police officers for their dedication and hard work at the grassroots level in serving the public and maintaining social stability for the people. He emphasized that the police bear the important responsibility of safeguarding the people’s well-being and the country’s peace, calling on Chinese police to uphold fine traditions, devote themselves to wholeheartedly addressing the needs and concerns of the people, and work diligently to protect the safety of the public. The ‘Zhangzhou 110’ unit is one of the exemplary primary-level units within China’s police forces. Since 1990, it has pioneered and continuously improved a rapid response mechanism tied to the 110 police emergency call service, playing a significant role in combating crime, maintaining public security, and serving the community. During his tenure in Fujian, Xi visited the police unit three times to inspect and guide its work. Recently, members of the unit wrote to Xi, reporting on their work and expressing their determination to fulfill duties on the new journey.”

Next, there’s a report on Qiushi publishing Xi’s article on basic research. The article is drawn from Xi’s speech at a symposium on strengthening basic research in Shanghai in April 2026. Xi makes five points in the piece.

“First, fully recognize the importance and urgency of strengthening basic research. Basic research is the source of the entire scientific system, the master switch for all technological problems, and the frontline position in global scientific and technological competition. The history of human development shows that every major breakthrough in basic research drives tremendous progress in science and technology and brings about a marked leap in social productive forces. An important criterion for measuring a country’s scientific and technological strength is its level of basic research. To become a world science and technology power, we must raise the level of basic research. At present, a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is achieving breakthroughs at an accelerating pace, global scientific and technological competition is becoming more focused on basic and frontier fields, scientific discovery and technological invention are mutually reinforcing and advancing together, and the importance of original and disruptive innovation is becoming increasingly prominent. For us, this is both a historic opportunity and a new challenge.

Since the 18th Party Congress, the Central Committee has attached great importance to basic research. By optimizing the layout of scientific research, increasing investment and support, and innovating systems and mechanisms, it has driven a marked rise in the level of China’s basic research. At the same time, we must see that, compared with the world’s science and technology powers, our basic research still lags behind. This requires us to strengthen our sense of crisis and sense of urgency, and to strengthen basic research with greater intensity and more concrete measures.

At present, all levels and all relevant parties have a steadily improving understanding of basic research on the whole, but some localities and units still do not attach enough importance to it. Basic research is an undertaking that lays foundations and benefits the long term. We must neither seek quick success and pursue immediate benefits nor do nothing out of passivity. We must have the vision and sense of responsibility of ‘those who came before planting trees so that those who come after may enjoy the shade’, and the perseverance and willpower of ‘10 years spent grinding a single sword’. This is not merely a question of the approach to scientific research work; it is even more a question of the view of the overall situation and the view of performance and achievement. We must earnestly examine, lay out, and rectify deviations in the view of performance and achievement in scientific research work. We must push all levels and all relevant parties, in light of actual conditions, to truly put basic research work on the important agenda, grasp it with full effort, grasp it continuously, and keep grasping it until it yields new results.”

第一，充分认识加强基础研究的重要性紧迫性。基础研究是整个科学体系的源头，是所有技术问题的总机关，是全球科技竞争的前沿阵地。人类发展历史表明，基础研究的每一次重大突破，都会推动科学技术巨大进步，带动社会生产力显著跃升。衡量一个国家的科技实力，一个重要标准就是看基础研究水平。要成为世界科技强国，基础研究必须搞上去。当前，新一轮科技革命和产业变革加速突破，全球科技竞争更加聚焦基础前沿领域，科学发现和技术发明互促共进，原创性颠覆性创新的重要性日益凸显。这对我们来说既是历史机遇，也是新的挑战。党的十八大以来，党中央高度重视基础研究，通过优化科研布局、加大投入保障、创新体制机制等，推动我国基础研究水平显著提升。同时要看到，与世界科技强国相比，我们的基础研究仍然存在差距，要求我们增强危机感和紧迫感，以更大力度、更实举措加强基础研究。当前，各级各有关方面对基础研究总体上认识不断提高，但一些地方和单位仍然存在重视不够的问题。基础研究是打基础、利长远的事业，既不能急功近利，也不可消极无为，要有“前人栽树、后人乘凉”的境界和担当，有“十年磨一剑”的恒心和毅力。这不只是科研工作思路问题，更是大局观、政绩观问题。要认真查摆和整改科研工作方面的政绩观偏差，推动各级各有关方面结合实际真正把基础研究工作摆上重要日程，倾力抓、持续抓，不断抓出新成效.

“Second, optimize the systematic layout of basic research. As we enter the era of big science, basic research is becoming ever more organized. This requires us to strengthen overall planning and top-level design, and to accelerate the formation of a strategic, forward-looking, and systematic layout. We must get the objectives and direction right. Only by shooting the arrow at the target can the quality of basic research be raised. We must adhere to the strategic orientation of the ‘Four Orientations’. Starting from the country’s urgent needs and long-term requirements, we must further clarify the main directions of attack and key fields of basic research, and advance original innovation and tackling key and core technologies in a coordinated way. We must adopt differentiated policies according to the circumstances of different fields, and focus on developing strengths, shoring up shortcomings, and strengthening weak links.

We must strengthen coordination among forces. Basic research has a strong systemic character, and we must therefore broadly mobilize the forces of all parties. We should give full play to the advantages of the new system for mobilizing the whole nation, strengthen the leading role of national laboratories, national research institutions, high-level research universities, and others, and integrate resources to advance original and disruptive innovation. We should encourage and regulate the development of new types of research and development institutions, explore innovative approaches to research management, and expand the forces engaged in basic research. We should support leading science and technology enterprises in taking the lead in or participating in basic research projects, promote deep integration of industry, academia, and research led by enterprises, and open up the innovation chain linking basic research, applied development, and the commercialization and application of research results.

We must improve the layout of disciplines. The system of disciplines is an important foundation for basic research. In the new situation where disciplinary boundaries keep expanding, we must improve the mechanism for setting up and adjusting disciplines. We must strengthen the building of basic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and the earth sciences, and promote the coordinated development of applied and basic disciplines. We must pay attention to and support less-studied and weak disciplines, cultivate emerging disciplines, and encourage multidisciplinary convergence and interdisciplinary research.”

第二，优化基础研究系统布局。进入大科学时代，基础研究组织化程度越来越高，需要我们加强统筹谋划和顶层设计，加快形成战略性、前瞻性、体系化布局。要把准目标方向。有的放矢才能提高基础研究质量。要坚持“四个面向”战略导向，从国家急迫需要和长远需求出发，进一步明确基础研究的主攻方向和重点领域，统筹推进原始创新和关键核心技术攻关。根据不同领域情况分类施策，着力扬优势、补短板、强弱项。要强化力量协同。基础研究系统性强，必须广泛调动各方力量。要发挥新型举国体制优势，强化国家实验室、国家科研机构、高水平研究型大学等引领作用，整合资源推进原创性颠覆性创新。鼓励和规范发展新型研发机构，探索创新科研管理方式，壮大基础研究力量。支持科技领军企业牵头或参与基础研究项目，推动企业主导的产学研深度融合，打通基础研究、应用开发、成果转化的创新链条。要健全学科布局。学科体系是基础研究的重要基础。面对学科边界不断拓展的新形势，要完善学科设置调整机制。加强数学、物理、化学、生物、天文、地学等基础学科建设，促进应用学科与基础学科协调发展，关注扶持冷门学科、薄弱学科，培育新兴学科，鼓励多学科交叉融合和跨学科研究.

“Third, expand the ranks of basic research talent. In the final analysis, basic research depends on high-calibre talent. We must advance the development of education, science and technology, and talent in an integrated way, and do a good job across the board in cultivating, recruiting, and utilising talent, striving to make the basic research workforce sufficient in number, excellent in quality, and rational in structure. We must focus on raising the quality of independent cultivation. Independent cultivation has always been the main channel for cultivating talent. We must follow the laws of talent growth, comprehensively raise the quality of education, and continuously cultivate reserve forces for basic research. We must implement the Top Talent Training Plan, the Strong Foundation Plan, and the Talent Programme in a coordinated way, give attention to early cultivation at the basic education stage, and improve the integrated bachelor’s–master’s–doctoral training model, so as to produce more top-notch innovative talent in basic disciplines. We must optimize the mechanism for collaboration between science and education in cultivating talent, and give attention to discovering and cultivating high-calibre talent on the front line of scientific research. We must vigorously support young talent. Young talent is the vital force of basic research, and many major achievements have been made by young people. We must cultivate the ranks of young talent in succession across the whole chain, adhere to task-driven training and the experienced guiding the new, strengthen education and guidance as well as care and concern, pave roads and build bridges for young scientific and technological personnel to grow and become accomplished, and support them in shouldering heavy responsibilities and playing leading roles.

We must actively foster a good atmosphere. Basic research is an undertaking that explores the unknown, and it requires passion and steadfastness. We must continuously improve the working and living conditions of basic researchers, guarantee their pay and benefits, and help resolve their practical difficulties, so that they can be settled in their lives, at ease in their minds, and secure in their work. We must vigorously promote the spirit of scientists, tell the stories of scientists well, and strengthen the popularization of science, so as to spark the curiosity, imagination, and desire to explore of young people, and make devoting oneself to basic research the life pursuit of more young people.”

第三，壮大基础研究人才队伍。基础研究归根结底靠高水平人才。要一体推进教育科技人才发展，全方位做好培养、引进、使用工作，努力使基础研究人才数量充足、素质优良、结构合理。要着力提高自主培养质量。自主培养始终是人才培养的主渠道。要遵循人才成长规律，全面提高教育质量，源源不断培养基础研究后备力量。统筹实施拔尖计划、强基计划、英才计划，注重基础教育阶段早期培养，完善本硕博贯通培养模式，造就更多基础学科拔尖创新人才。优化科教协同育人机制，注重在科研一线发现和培养高水平人才。要大力扶持青年人才。青年人才是基础研究的生力军，很多重大成果都是年轻人做出来的。要全链条接续培养青年人才队伍，坚持任务牵引、以老带新，加强教育引导和关心关爱，为青年科技人员的成长成才铺路搭桥，支持他们挑大梁、当主角。要积极营造良好氛围。基础研究是一项探索未知的事业，需要热爱和坚守。要不断改善基础研究人员的工作和生活条件，保障薪酬待遇，帮助解决实际困难，让他们安身安心安业。大力弘扬科学家精神，讲好科学家故事，加强科普宣传，激发青少年的好奇心、想象力和探求欲，让投身基础研究成为更多青少年的人生追求.

“Fourth, strengthen support and guarantees for basic research. Basic research is to a large extent oriented towards the future, and we must persevere over the long term. We must have the courage to break through obstacles in thinking and institutional barriers, and provide basic research with long-term, stable funding guarantees and policy support. We must increase funding. At present, basic research funding accounts for more than 7% of China’s total R&D spending across society, but this still falls well short of the 15% to 20% share in the world’s science and technology powers. We must gradually raise the share of basic research funding, further broaden funding channels, steadily increase fiscal investment, and guide enterprises and social forces to increase their investment, so as to form a diversified funding pattern for basic research. We must raise the effectiveness of science foundation funding. We must provide stable support to research institutions and platform bases engaged in basic research, provide continued support to outstanding research teams and talent on the basis of competitive, merit-based selection, and adopt rolling support for major original projects.

We must optimize research conditions. Based on independently guaranteeing the basic conditions for scientific research, we must plan and build major science and technology infrastructure in a systematic way. We must strengthen the building of national scientific data centres and raise the level of open data sharing and the efficiency of data use. We must step up the building of world-class science and technology journals, and encourage research results from home and abroad to be published first in Chinese journals and on Chinese platforms. We must attach importance to artificial intelligence empowering basic research, develop scientific foundation large models and specialized models for particular disciplines, and build intelligent research platform systems, so as to accelerate scientific breakthroughs across all fields. (Note: So much of this is contingent on the overall political environment. How does one attract world-class scholars and writers when research is being securitised at the same time?)

We must deepen reform of the science and technology system. We should establish and improve a categorized evaluation system suited to the characteristics of basic research, refine mechanisms including evaluation based on representative achievements, long-cycle evaluation, international peer evaluation, and team evaluation, and place greater emphasis on the originality and academic value of research achievements. We should improve incentive mechanisms for basic research, deepen reform of the granting of rights over scientific and technological achievements generated in the course of one’s official duties, and establish mechanisms for the mutual promotion of basic research and the transformation of research achievements. We should reform scientific research management methods, loosening constraints and reducing burdens on basic research personnel.

We must purify the research ecosystem. We must foster an innovation environment that is open and inclusive and tolerant of failure. We must encourage basic researchers to immerse themselves in research and dare to raise new questions, open up new fields, and explore new paths. We must strengthen the building of research integrity, and push the scientific and technological community to rectify its academic style and transform its work style. We must break up ‘circle culture’ and the conduct of ‘academic warlords’. We must effectively reverse the tendency to judge solely by papers, solely by top journals, solely by ‘hats’, and solely by awards, and resolutely punish corruption in scientific research.”

第四，加强对基础研究的支持保障。基础研究很大程度是面向未来的，必须久久为功。要勇于破除思想障碍和制度藩篱，为基础研究提供长期稳定的投入保障和政策支持。要加大经费投入。目前我国基础研究经费在全社会研发投入中的占比超过7%，但与世界科技强国15%至20%的比重相比仍有不小差距。要逐步提高基础研究经费占比，进一步拓宽筹资渠道，稳步增加财政投入，引导企业和社会力量加大投入，形成基础研究多元化投入格局。提高科学基金资助效能，对从事基础研究的科研机构和平台基地提供稳定支持，对优秀研究团队和人才实行竞争择优基础上的接续支持，对重大原创项目采取滚动式支持。要优化研究条件。立足科研基础条件自主保障，体系化布局建设重大科技基础设施。加强国家科学数据中心建设，提高数据开放共享水平和利用效率。加紧建设世界一流科技期刊，鼓励国内外成果在我国期刊和平台首发。重视人工智能赋能基础研究，开发科学基础大模型和学科领域专业模型，建设智能化科研平台系统，促进各领域科学加速突破。要深化科技体制改革。健全符合基础研究特点的分类评价体系，完善代表成果评价、长周期评价、国际同行评价、团队评价等机制，更加注重研究成果的原创性和学术价值。完善基础研究激励机制，深化职务科技成果赋权改革，建立基础研究与成果转化互促机制。改革科研管理方式，为基础研究人员松绑减负。要净化科研生态。营造开放包容、宽容失败的创新环境，鼓励基础研究人员潜心钻研，敢于提出新问题、开辟新领域、探索新路径。加强科研诚信建设，推动科技界正学风转作风，破除“圈子文化”和“学阀”做派，切实扭转唯论文、唯顶刊、唯帽子、唯奖项倾向，坚决惩治科研腐败。

“Fifth, expand international cooperation in basic research. Exploring the frontiers of world science is impossible without international cooperation. We must take the initiative to integrate ourselves into global innovation networks, and enhance our capacity for original innovation through openness and cooperation. We should deepen international exchanges and cooperation in basic research between governments and non-governmental actors, make use of platforms such as BRI, and join with countries around the world in tackling major scientific questions in areas such as climate change, energy and the environment, and life and health. We should increase the degree of openness of national science and technology programmes to the outside world, and expand the scale of exchanges among basic research personnel. We should take the lead in launching and join international mega-science programmes and mega-science projects, support the establishment of international scientific and technological organizations in China, and support domestic universities, scientific research institutions, and science and technology organizations in actively participating in global science and technology governance.”

第五，拓展基础研究国际合作。探索世界科学前沿，国际合作必不可少。要主动融入全球创新网络，在开放合作中提升原始创新能力。深化政府和民间基础研究国际交流合作，发挥共建“一带一路”等平台作用，联合各国开展气候变化、能源环境、生命健康等重大科学问题攻关。加大国家科技计划对外开放力度，扩大基础研究人员交流规模。牵头发起和加入国际大科学计划、大科学工程，支持在华设立国际科技组织，支持国内高校、科研院所、科技组织积极参与全球科技治理.

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Moving on, there’s a report on Han Zheng’s address at the Xiangshan Forum. The report says:

Han Zheng said that “at present, the profound changes unseen in a century are accelerating, and the international situation is becoming increasingly intertwined with turbulence and transformation. In the face of the changes in the world, changes of the times, and changes in history, President Xi Jinping has put forward the concept of building a community with a shared future for humanity and the four major global initiatives, pointing the way toward resolving the common problems confronting humanity. Although today’s world faces complex challenges, the trend of the times toward peace, development, cooperation, and win-win outcomes is unstoppable; the general trend toward a multipolar world and economic globalization is irreversible; the desire of the people of all countries to achieve development and security has become increasingly urgent; and the call for international fairness and justice has grown ever stronger.” 韩正表示，当前世界百年变局加速演进，国际形势变乱交织。面对世界之变、时代之变、历史之变，习近平主席提出构建人类命运共同体理念和四大全球倡议，为解决人类面临的共同问题指明了方向。尽管当今世界面临复杂挑战，但和平、发展、合作、共赢的时代潮流不可阻挡，世界多极化、经济全球化的大势不可逆转，各国人民要求实现发展和安全的愿望更加迫切，追求国际公平正义的呼声更加强烈.

Han then put forward four proposals:

• First, adhere to upholding the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, adhere to sovereign equality, oppose interference in internal affairs, oppose the use of force or the threat of force at every turn, and prevent the world from sliding back into the law of the jungle, where the weak are prey to the strong.

• Second, adhere to true multilateralism, respect the development paths and social systems independently chosen by the people of each country, respect the legitimate security concerns of all countries, and build a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable model of global governance.

• Third, adhere to resolving differences and disputes through dialogue and consultation, support all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of crises, use dialogue to enhance mutual trust, resolve disputes, and promote security, and prevent the escalation and spread of conflicts.

• Fourth, adhere to being people-centred and to technology for good. In the face of flourishing emerging technologies, it is essential to accelerate improving governance rules in emerging domains such as AI, cyberspace, and outer space, strengthen open cooperation, and serve the cause of global peace and development.

韩正提出四点建议。一是坚持维护联合国宪章宗旨和原则，坚持主权平等，反对干涉内政，反对动辄使用武力或以武力相威胁，防止世界退回弱肉强食的丛林法则。二是坚持真正的多边主义，尊重各国人民自主选择的发展道路和社会制度，尊重各国合理安全关切，构建更具包容性、公平性、可持续性的全球治理模式。三是坚持通过对话协商化解分歧和争端，支持一切有利于和平解决危机的努力，以对话增互信、解纷争、促安全，防止冲突升级和蔓延。四是坚持以人为本、科技向善，面对蓬勃发展的新兴技术，要加快完善人工智能、网络空间、外空等新兴领域治理规则，加强开放合作，服务全球和平与发展事业.

“Han Zheng pointed out that China, as a responsible major country and the largest developing country, has always placed its own development within the coordinate system of human development, and makes its due contribution to world peace and stability and to development and prosperity through Chinese-style modernization. China has always been a force for peace. It actively explores the right way for major countries to get along in the new era, supports advancing the cause of international peace with concrete actions, and takes the lead in serving as a ‘stabilizer’ of world peace. China has always been a force for justice. It resolutely defends the fruits of victory in the Second World War and the post-war international order, opposes all schemes and acts to revive militarism and endanger regional security and stability, and promotes the development of the global governance system in a more just and equitable direction. China has always been a force for progress. It adheres to sharing opportunities with the world and achieving win-win outcomes through open development, works hand in hand to advance an equal and orderly multipolar world and universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization, and promotes exchanges and mutual learning among different civilizations.” 韩正指出，中国作为负责任大国和最大的发展中国家，始终将自身发展置于人类发展的坐标系，以中国式现代化为世界的和平稳定和发展繁荣作出应有贡献。中国始终是和平的力量，积极探索新时代大国正确相处之道，以实际行动支持推进国际和平事业，带头做世界和平的“稳定器”。中国始终是正义的力量，坚决捍卫二战胜利成果和战后国际秩序，反对一切复活军国主义、危害地区安全稳定的图谋和行径，推动全球治理体系朝着更加公正合理的方向发展。中国始终是进步的力量，坚持在开放发展中与世界分享机遇、实现共赢，携手推进平等有序的世界多极化和普惠包容的经济全球化，促进不同文明交流互鉴.

Defense Minister Dong Jun also spoke at this forum. Reuters reports:

Chinese Defence ​Minister Dong Jun urged nations on Wednesday to avoid provocative acts and curb the resurgence of regressive historical trends in ‌remarks likely to be taken as veiled criticism of Japan…Warning that the world had arrived at a “fragile moment”, Dong called for a ​fresher, more equal approach to resolving international tension, but offered few specifics or direct criticism of rivals. “We must bear in mind the ​lessons of history and remain highly vigilant against all latent manifestations of hegemony, militarism and historical revisionism,” he said ⁠in an opening speech. “We must not turn a blind eye or condone such behaviour. By rallying broad-based forces of justice, we must suppress the resurgence ​of historical dregs and prevent them from exploiting the situation to cause harm” … Dong urged efforts towards a peaceful, multipolar world marked by “partnership rather than alliance, win-win rather than zero sum”. “We must show no leniency towards provocative acts that seek to hijack the overall interests of countries in the region for the sake of personal gain or the interests of particular cliques, and we must work together to rein them in,” he added.

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Page 2: There’s a report with NBS data on the economy in August. It says:

• Total value added of industrial enterprises above the designated size grew by 5.2 percent year on year, 0.7 percentage points faster than that of last month, or grew by 0.54 percent month on month.

• In terms of sectors, the value added of mining decreased by 1.4 percent year on year, that of manufacturing grew by 6.1 percent, and that of production and supply of electricity, heat power, gas and water went up by 4.9 percent.

• The value added of equipment manufacturing increased by 12.1 percent year on year and that of high-tech manufacturing increased by 16.7 percent, 6.9 percentage points and 11.5 percentage points faster than that of the industrial enterprises above the designated size respectively.

• The production of lithium-ion batteries, industrial robots and 3D printing devices grew by 57.2 percent, 34.6 percent and 29.9 percent year on year respectively.

In the first eight months, the value added of industrial enterprises above the designated size went up by 5.3 percent year on year. In August, the Manufacturing PMI Index stood at 49.8 percent and the Production and Operation Expectation Index was 53.8 percent. In the first seven months, the total profits made by industrial enterprises above the designated size were 4,582.1 billion yuan, up by 17.6 percent year on year.

• In August, the Index of Services Production grew by 4.1 percent year on year; in the first seven months, the business revenue of service enterprises above the designated size grew by 5.7 percent year on year.

In terms of retail sales:

• Total retail sales of goods and services: up 2.5% year on year.

• Retail sales of goods: up 1.0% year on year; retail sales of services up 4.9% year on year.

Fixed assets investment:

• This reached 29.309 trillion yuan, down by 7.2 percent year on year; the investment in fixed assets was down by 4.2 percent with the investment in real estate development deducted.

• Investment in high-tech industries grew by 5.2 percent year on year, of which the investment in information services, aerospace vehicle and equipment manufacturing, and electronic and communication equipment manufacturing grew by 22.7 percent, 14.9 percent and 6.9 percent respectively.

• Investment in infrastructure declined by 4.0 percent year on year; that in manufacturing was down by 2.3 percent; and that in real estate development declined by 19.9 percent.

• Private investment went down by 10.1 percent year on year, or down by 6.4 percent with the investment in real estate development deducted.

• The floor space of newly-built commercial buildings sold was 498.80 million square meters, down by 12.1 percent year on year; the total sales of newly-built commercial buildings were 4,747.0 billion yuan, down by 13.0 percent.

Trade:

• In the first eight months, the total value of imports and exports of goods reached 34.775 trillion yuan, up by 17.6 percent year on year.

• The total value of exports was 20.166 trillion yuan, up by 14.6 percent. The total value of imports was 14.610 trillion yuan, up by 22.0 percent.

Additional data:

• In the first eight months, the urban surveyed unemployment rate averaged 5.2 percent.

• August CPI increased by 0.8 percent year on year, 0.3 percentage points higher than that of the previous month. In the first eight months, the CPI went up by 0.9 percent year on year.

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Page 3: Xi Jinping is going to be traveling to DC soon. We know that US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent will meet He Lifeng in New York on Sunday. FT reports that:

“Bessent and He Lifeng are expected to discuss AI in New York. China in May said Trump and Xi had agreed to set up an AI dialogue, while the US president said the leaders had discussed “guardrails” in Beijing. But the two sides have not held any senior-level meetings on the topic since May. Trump and Xi reached a ceasefire in their trade and technology war last October when they met in Busan, South Korea, following months of tit-for-tat measures, including tariffs and export controls. In Busan, Trump agreed to postpone the imposition of export controls that would have affected thousands of Chinese companies. Beijing held back draconian restrictions on exports of rare earths and critical minerals. Ahead of the summit in Washington, China has pushed to extend the Busan truce for the rest of Trump’s term. But several people familiar with the talks said the US was insisting on a six-month extension, partly because it believes China is not fully living up to the commitments on rare earths reached in Busan. The US has also been pushing China to ease restrictions on rare earth exports to Japan, in pressure partly designed to help an ally but also because the restrictions are having a knock-on impact on US supply chains. Washington and Tokyo are particularly concerned about China slowing exports of yttrium, a hard-to-substitute metal used in an array of products including lasers, aircraft engines and semiconductors. The two sides have also been hammering out details for a Board of Trade that Trump and Xi agreed to create in Beijing. The mechanism would identify products in non-sensitive areas for tariff reduction.”

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In classic agenda setting, we now have a Zhong Sheng commentary on Sino-US ties. Frankly, this is quite a positive take. For all the pushback on American allegations about industrial-scale distillation, the article basically says that China is open to “constructive and professional discussions” on AI governance. Of course, there are caveats around what Beijing sees as unfair contracts, containment and denial. So, it will likely want to place these on the table as part of the conversation.

“Recently, the US NSA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the FBI jointly issued an advisory accusing Chinese artificial intelligence enterprises of carrying out ‘industrial-scale’ distillation against the United States to obtain the capabilities of US frontier models, and recommending relevant defensive measures to US enterprises. This US accusation is baseless in fact and groundless in law. In essence, it politicizes and instrumentalizes distillation, a normal technical and commercial matter in the industry, and applies double standards. It once again exposes the consistent US logic of pursuing technological hegemony, practising computing-power monopoly, and suppressing competition in the field of artificial intelligence. China firmly opposes this. 近日，美国国家安全局、网络安全与基础设施安全局、联邦调查局联合发布公告，指责中国人工智能企业对美开展“工业规模”蒸馏，获取美前沿模型能力，并向美企提出相关防御措施建议。美方这一指控于事无凭、于法无据，本质是将蒸馏这一业内正常的技术和商业问题政治化、工具化，并在实践中搞双重标准，再次暴露其在人工智能领域推行科技霸权、搞算力垄断、打压竞争的一贯逻辑，中方对此坚决反对.

Distillation is a common practice by which models in the field of artificial intelligence learn from one another. It is in essence a neutral technical means, used by model enterprises around the world, including American enterprises. By using a high-performing ‘teacher model’ to guide a lighter ‘student model’, distillation can raise the efficiency of model training and enable more efficient use of human knowledge. It is of positive significance for countries in developing their artificial intelligence industries, unleashing technological potential, bridging the development gap, and bringing broader benefits to developing countries and the general public. 蒸馏是人工智能领域各个模型间互相学习的通行做法，本质是中性技术手段，包括美企在内的全球模型企业都在使用。通过性能优异的“教师模型”指导更轻量的“学生模型”，蒸馏技术能够提升模型训练效率，实现人类知识的更高效利用，对各国发展人工智能产业、释放技术潜力、弥补发展鸿沟、更广泛惠及发展中国家和社会大众具有积极意义.

China encourages open source and openness, cooperation and sharing. It has opened its open-source models to enterprises worldwide, including American enterprises, and facilitates the research and development of related models. Model development reports by US enterprises have also disclosed that they extensively distil Chinese models. By the US logic, when American enterprises use distillation it is ‘common industry practice’, but when Chinese enterprises use it, it is an ‘attack’. This is a naked double standard. 中方鼓励开源开放、合作共享，向包括美企在内的全球企业开放开源模型，为相关模型研发提供便利。美企有关模型研发报告也披露，其大量蒸馏中国模型。按照美方的逻辑，美国企业使用蒸馏便是“行业通行做法”，中国企业运用便是“攻击行为”，这是赤裸裸的双重标准.

In elevating a common industry practice into a national security issue, the United States is in reality practising industrial monopoly in the name of cracking down on distillation. For a long time, certain US artificial intelligence enterprises have abused their dominant competitive position by inserting overlord clauses (霸王条款--unfair contractual terms), such as broad geographic restrictions, into their user agreements, in an attempt to exclude competitors from China and other countries from the global technology ecosystem and to monopolize the dividends of artificial intelligence development. This time, by having its security agencies issue the advisory directly, the United States is seeking to bind the interests of individual enterprises and capital to national security and deploy the coercive organs of state power to interfere in normal commercial activity, thereby undoubtedly endorsing those overlord clauses. For some time now, the US executive and legislative branches have repeatedly issued threats of sanctions and suppression against Chinese enterprises, with restrictive measures extending step by step from chip controls and compute-power blockades to fields such as model access. The United States does not hesitate to mobilize state power to maintain its technological hegemony and compute-power monopoly. The root cause lies in its deep-seated anxiety about its technological hegemony slipping from its grasp. What it still pursues is the hegemonic logic that ‘only America may win alone; humanity may not win together’.” 美方将行业通行做法上升为国家安全问题，是以打击蒸馏为名，行产业垄断之实。长期以来，美国个别人工智能企业滥用竞争优势地位，在用户协议中设置宽泛的地域限制等霸王条款，试图将中国等国家的竞争者排除在全球技术生态之外，独占人工智能发展红利。此次美方由安全部门直接发布公告，将个别企业和资本利益与国家安全相捆绑，动用国家强权机构干涉正常商业活动，无疑是为这些霸王条款背书。一段时期以来，美国行政、立法机关频频发出对中国企业的制裁打压威胁，限制措施从芯片管制、算力封锁一步步延伸到模型访问等领域。美方不惜动用国家力量维护科技霸权和算力垄断，根源在于对自身技术霸权旁落的深层焦虑，奉行的依然是“只能美国独赢，不能人类共赢”的霸权逻辑.

However, blocking and containment have never been able to stop the advance of scientific and technological progress. The development of China’s artificial intelligence is the fruit of high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-strengthening. It has also benefited from China’s consistent adherence to the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, and of openness and cooperation. In recent years, Chinese artificial intelligence enterprises have continued to make solid progress in fields such as fundamental algorithms, compute-power deployment, and application scenarios. Relying on a complete industrial system and rich application scenarios, they have steadily lowered the threshold for developing and applying artificial intelligence technology, breaking down the high-price barriers that a few US enterprises have built by piling up capital and computing power. Denis Simon, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has stated that the United States should not treat openness and security as a zero-sum game, and that trying to maintain its lead by building high walls in the field of science and technology will ultimately only prove counterproductive. 然而，封堵遏制从来阻挡不了科技进步的步伐。中国人工智能的发展是高水平科技自立自强的成果，也得益于中方始终秉持共商共建共享和开放合作理念。近年来，中国人工智能企业在基础算法、算力布局、场景应用等领域持续取得扎实进展，依靠完整产业体系和丰富应用场景，不断降低人工智能技术的开发与应用门槛，打破少数美国企业靠资本与算力堆砌的高价壁垒。美国昆西治国方略研究所高级研究员丹尼斯·西蒙就曾表示，美国不应将开放与安全视为零和博弈，试图靠在科技领域筑起高墙维持领先，最终只会适得其反.

Artificial intelligence is a new frontier of human development. It is not the patent of major countries, still less should it be reduced to a gladiatorial arena of zero-sum games. At present, the global large-model industry is at a critical period of technological iteration, recurring risks, and growth and development. As major countries in artificial intelligence, China and the United States should handle the challenges and risks facing this field with a positive and responsible attitude. The two heads of state have already agreed to conduct an intergovernmental dialogue on artificial intelligence. On the principles of equality and mutual benefit and of win-win cooperation, China is willing to hold constructive and professional discussions with the US side through dialogue, and to jointly promote the open, inclusive, universally beneficial, and good-oriented development of artificial intelligence. 人工智能是人类发展的新领域，不是大国的专利，更不应沦为零和博弈的角斗场。当前，全球大模型产业正处于技术迭代、风险迭发、成长发展的关键时期。中美作为人工智能大国，应以积极负责态度处理该领域面临的挑战和风险。两国元首已同意开展人工智能政府间对话，中方愿以平等互利、合作共赢原则，通过对话与美方开展建设性和专业讨论，共同推动人工智能开放、包容、普惠、向善发展.

We hope that the US side will move in the same direction as China, manage risks through dialogue and communication, jointly foster an open, equal, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for artificial intelligence development, and promote artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of all humanity. However, if the US side, in the name of cracking down on distillation, takes actions to contain and suppress Chinese artificial intelligence enterprises and harms China’s legitimate and lawful rights and interests, China will certainly take resolute countermeasures in response.” 希望美方与中方相向而行，通过对话和沟通管控风险，共同营造开放、平等、公平、非歧视的人工智能发展环境，推动人工智能技术造福全人类。但如果美方以打击蒸馏为名，实施遏压中国人工智能企业的行动，损害中方正当合法权益，中方必将坚决采取措施予以反制.

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Page 1: There’s a report on the new 15th FYP for Services and Guarantees for Retired Military Personnel/Veterans.

The document says that “veterans are a precious asset of the Party and the state and an important force in advancing Chinese-style modernization, and that work related to retired military personnel bears on reform, development and stability and on the cause of strengthening the military and invigorating the military. It is necessary to fully implement Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Military and General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important expositions on veterans’ work; adhere to the policy of serving economic and social development and serving national defense and military construction; take promoting the high-quality development of veterans’ work as the theme, take further deepening reform of veterans’ management and support as the driving force, and continuously improve the organizational management system, work-operation system, and policy and institutional system, and earnestly receive and resettle retired military personnel well, serve and guarantee them well, educate and manage them well, bring their role into play well, and safeguard their rights and interests well, so that the soldier becomes an occupation held in esteem by the whole of society and retired military personnel become people respected by the whole of society. 《规划》强调，退役军人是党和国家的宝贵财富，是推进中国式现代化的重要力量，退役军人工作事关改革发展稳定和强军兴军事业。要全面贯彻习近平强军思想以及习近平总书记关于退役军人工作的重要论述，坚持为经济社会发展服务、为国防和军队建设服务的方针，以推动退役军人工作高质量发展为主题，以进一步深化退役军人管理保障改革为动力，持续完善组织管理体系、工作运行体系、政策制度体系，切实把退役军人接收安置好、服务保障好、教育管理好、作用发挥好、权益维护好，让军人成为全社会尊崇的职业，让退役军人成为全社会尊重的人.

The document puts forward that during the 15th FYP period veterans’ work must adhere to the leadership of the Party, guiding veterans firmly to heed the Party’s words and follow the Party; adhere to putting people first, guaranteeing well and safeguarding well the lawful rights and interests of veterans; adhere to upholding fundamental principles while breaking new ground, deepening reform in key areas and crucial links; adhere to military-civilian coordination, strengthening the linking up of policies and institutions and the coordination of work measures; and adhere to applying differentiated policies by category, enhancing the precision, convenience and sustainability of services and guarantees.《规划》提出，“十五五”时期退役军人工作要坚持党的领导，引导退役军人坚定听党话跟党走；坚持以人为本，保障好、维护好退役军人的合法权益；坚持守正创新，深化重点领域和关键环节改革；坚持军地协同，加强政策制度衔接和工作举措协同；坚持分类施策，增强服务保障的精准性、便捷性、可持续性.

The document focuses on such areas as improving the governance system for veterans’ affairs, deepening ideological and political guidance and commendation and incentives, advancing high-quality resettlement and employment for veterans, raising the level of work to support the military and give preferential treatment to military personnel and their families, and improving the effectiveness of services and support for veterans, and sets out a number of key tasks. At the same time, it proposes projects including improving the quality and increasing the efficiency of veterans’ service centers (stations), upgrading and renovating facilities commemorating martyrs, and enhancing the capabilities of the system for medical care and recuperation for entitled groups. 《规划》提出，“十五五”时期退役军人工作要坚持党的领导，引导退役军人坚定听党话跟党走；坚持以人为本，保障好、维护好退役军人的合法权益；坚持守正创新，深化重点领域和关键环节改革；坚持军地协同，加强政策制度衔接和工作举措协同；坚持分类施策，增强服务保障的精准性、便捷性、可持续性。《规划》围绕健全退役军人事务治理体系、深化思想政治引领和褒扬激励、推进退役军人高质量安置就业、提高拥军优属工作水平、提升退役军人服务保障效能等方面，部署了一批重点任务。同时，提出了退役军人服务中心（站）提质增效、烈士纪念设施提质改造、优抚医疗康养体系能力提升等工程项目.

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Also on the page is a long feature article on Xi’s engagement at the BRICS summit in Delhi. A lot of it is repetitive in terms of what’s being said. But the India-specific section is interesting.

“‘The eyes of the whole world are focused on the meeting of the Chinese and Indian leaders’; ‘two great Asian countries will sit down together once again’; ‘can Beijing and New Delhi turn over a new page’—before the China-India bilateral meeting had even begun, analysis and observation from all sides already flooded the airwaves, with Indian television channels in particular following and reporting on it with a countdown. As the two most populous countries in the world and important members of the Global South, and as two neighbouring major countries (作为相邻的两个大国), China-India relations receive a high degree of attention from the international community. On the evening of the 12th, what message did the face-to-face meeting of the leaders of China and India convey to the neighbourhood, to the Global South, and to the international community?

In October 2024, during the BRICS Leaders’ Meeting in Kazan, President Xi Jinping held a meeting with Prime Minister Modi, leading China-India relations to ‘set out anew’. In August 2025, on the eve of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Tianjin summit, President Xi Jinping held a further meeting with Prime Minister Modi, leading relations between the two countries to achieve a ‘further elevation’. Institutional exchanges have gradually been restored, the list of areas of cooperation keeps lengthening, bilateral trade volume has again reached a new high… Under the strategic guidance of the two countries’ leaders, China-India relations have returned to the track of restoration and improvement, and are moving forward step by step.

This time in New Delhi, President Xi Jinping set out four views, pointing out that China and India must ‘calibrate the direction with an objective and rational strategic cognition,’ ‘bring about each other’s success with the concept of win-win cooperation’, ‘eliminate interference with the political wisdom of mutual respect and mutual understanding,’ and ‘benefit all under Heaven with open and inclusive multilateral collaboration’, thereby providing important guidance for promoting the steady and long-term development of bilateral relations.

Prime Minister Modi listened attentively and expressed agreement. He stated that the Indian side has always viewed India-China relations from a strategic height and a long-term perspective, is willing to be a partner and not a rival with China, and regards each other’s development as an opportunity and not a challenge; and that India is willing to, on the basis of mutual respect and mutual trust, promote even greater development in relations between the two countries.

In the meeting, the leaders of the two countries reached a clear common understanding, i.e., to view and develop bilateral relations ‘always from a strategic height and a long-term perspective.’ President Xi Jinping stressed in particular that ‘the two sides should hold the future of humanity in their hearts and keep the well-being of the people in mind, join hands to advance the high-quality development of “Greater BRICS cooperation”, and provide more positive energy for promoting world peace, stability, development and prosperity.’ Such a broad vision and grand strategic outlook manifests the practical wisdom that an ancient Eastern civilization draws from the depths of history.

Holding the future of humanity in one’s heart, keeping the well-being of the people in mind…looking back over head-of-state diplomacy this year, which has seen one high point after another and one highlight after another, this is also the grand logic of China reading the momentum, working with it, and carrying it through, thereby leading the great changes taking place in the world to evolve in the correct direction of building a community with a shared future for humanity.

In the past fortnight, from the journey to Central Asia and the Middle East to the journey to South Asia, from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Bishkek summit to the BRICS Leaders’ Meeting in New Delhi, people have clearly seen that unity and cooperation with the broad mass of developing countries is always the unshakeable foundation of China’s external relations. Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping’s head-of-state diplomacy, China is working together with the international community, including the countries of the Global South, advancing one step at a time an equal and orderly multipolar world and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization, implementing the four major global initiatives, and promoting the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.”

(Note: It is interesting to note that the piece refers to India as a major country; this has not been the conventional label for India. But there have been occasions when it has been used. In the conventional articulation, major powers are China, the US, EU and Russia. India generally tends to fall within the peripheral diplomacy ambit.)

“全世界目光都聚焦于中印领导人会面”“两个亚洲大国将再次坐在一起”“北京与新德里能否掀开新一页”……中印双边会见尚未启幕，各方观察分析早已铺天盖地，印度电视频道更是以倒计时方式追踪报道。作为世界上人口最多的两个国家和全球南方重要成员，作为相邻的两个大国，中印关系受到国际社会高度关注。12日傍晚，中印两国领导人的面对面会晤，向周边、向全球南方、向国际社会传递了怎样的讯息？2024年10月，金砖国家领导人喀山会晤期间，习近平主席同莫迪总理举行会晤，引领中印关系“再出发”。2025年8月，上海合作组织天津峰会前夕，习近平主席同莫迪总理再次举行会晤，引领两国关系实现“再提升”。机制性交往逐步恢复，合作清单不断拉长，双边贸易额再创新高……在两国领导人战略指引下，中印关系回到恢复改善轨道，一步步地往前走。这一次在新德里，习近平主席谈了4点看法，指出中印要“以客观理性的战略认知校准方向”“以合作共赢理念相互成就”“以互尊互谅的政治智慧排除干扰”“以开放包容的多边协作兼济天下”，为推动双边关系行稳致远提供重要遵循。莫迪总理认真聆听，表示赞同。他表示，印方始终从战略高度和长远角度看待印中关系，愿同中国做伙伴而不是对手，将彼此发展视为机遇而非挑战。愿在相互尊重、相互信任基础上，推动两国关系得到更大发展。会见中，两国领导人达成明确共识：“始终从战略高度和长远角度”看待和发展双边关系。习近平主席特别强调：“双方要以人类前途为怀、以人民福祉为念，携手推动‘大金砖合作’高质量发展，为促进世界和平稳定和发展繁荣提供更多正能量。”这样的大视野、大格局，彰显着一个东方文明古国从历史深处汲取的现实智慧。以人类前途为怀、以人民福祉为念——回望今年以来高潮迭起、亮点纷呈的元首外交，这也正是中国顺势谋势成势、引领世界大变局朝着构建人类命运共同体正确方向发展演进的大逻辑。刚刚过去的半个月，从中亚、中东之行到南亚之行，从上海合作组织比什凯克峰会到金砖国家领导人新德里会晤，人们清晰看到，同广大发展中国家团结合作，始终是中国对外关系不可动摇的根基。在习近平主席元首外交引领下，中国正同包括全球南方国家在内的国际社会一道，一步一个脚印，推进平等有序的世界多极化、普惠包容的经济全球化，落实四大全球倡议，推动构建人类命运共同体。

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“Such magnanimity of a great country draws the world’s attention. From this spring’s wave of visits to China, to the China-US and China-Russia head-of-state meetings in May, and on to a new round of busy diplomatic season; from East Asia to Central Asia, from the Middle East to South Asia, the footprints of these visits have crossed mountains and seas, and major-country diplomacy has been rich and splendid. Regardless of region, regardless of cultural tradition, regardless of stage of development, more and more countries and China are rushing towards each other, and a global partnership that is equal, open and cooperative grows ever more resilient and close.

Such concepts of a great country win the world’s recognition. The major judgement made eight years ago at the BRICS Johannesburg summit, that ‘the coming decade will be a crucial decade in which the world economy switches between old and new drivers of growth’, is accelerating into a new world reality; the Global Development Initiative put forward five years ago at the UN General Assembly’s general debate has already won the active support of more than 130 countries and international organizations. Concepts such as ‘people-centeredness’, ‘the development philosophy of innovation, coordination, green development, openness and sharing’, ‘building an open world economy’, and ‘building a community with a shared future for humanity’ have won increasingly broad international recognition and were also written into the New Delhi Declaration this time.

(Note: The concept of building a community with a shared future for humanity or common destiny is not in the Declaration in its canonical form. The closest rendering is in Paragraph 7, pointing to the “aim to build a brighter shared future for the international community based on mutually beneficial cooperation.” So I guess this is what the article is pointing to. It also tells us a bit about the kind of language that PRC negotiators prioritise. One part of the process is to reflect back the global adoption of Chinese concepts in order to generate legitimacy.)

Such responsibility shouldered by a great country moves the world to admiration. In the face of the complex evolution of the situation in the Middle East and the Gulf, when President Xi Jinping visited Egypt, he put forward four proposals on building a new security architecture for the Middle East; at the New Delhi meeting this time, President Xi Jinping said that he was willing to work together with the BRICS members to play the role they should in achieving peace and tranquility in the Middle East and Gulf region. From actively exploring solutions to hotspot issues with Chinese characteristics, to providing an in-depth explanation of the core essence of an equal and orderly multipolarization of the world, and then to drawing up a new blueprint for the high-quality development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS cooperation mechanism…China has always stood firmly on the side of peace, on the side of cooperation, and on the right side of history.”

这样的大国气度令世界瞩目——从今年春季访华潮，到5月中美、中俄元首会晤，再到新一轮外交繁忙季；从东亚到中亚，从中东到南亚，出访足迹跨越山海，大国外交精彩纷呈。不分地域、不分文化传统、不分发展阶段，越来越多国家与中国双向奔赴，平等、开放、合作的全球伙伴关系愈发强韧紧密。这样的大国理念获世界认同——8年前金砖约翰内斯堡峰会上作出的重大论断“未来10年，将是世界经济新旧动能转换的关键10年”，正加速成为世界新现实；5年前联大一般性辩论时提出的全球发展倡议，已得到130多个国家和国际组织积极支持。“以人民为中心”“创新、协调、绿色、开放、共享的发展理念”“构建开放型世界经济”“构建人类命运共同体”等赢得日益广泛的国际认同，也被写入此次新德里宣言。这样的大国担当让世界感佩——面对中东海湾局势复杂演变，习近平主席访问埃及时，就构建中东安全新架构提出4点倡议；此次新德里会晤，习近平主席表示，愿同金砖成员一道，为实现中东海湾地区和平安宁发挥应有作用。从积极探索具有中国特色的热点问题解决之道，到深入阐释平等有序世界多极化的核心要义，再到为上海合作组织、金砖国家合作机制高质量发展擘画新蓝图……中国始终坚定站在和平一边、站在合作一边、站在历史正确一边.

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Page 2: There is a report on Wang Yi’s call with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot. Xinhua reports:

Wang said “that under the strategic guidance of the two heads of state, China-France relations have generally maintained stable development dynamics. Facing a complex and volatile international landscape, China and France, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, should strengthen strategic communication and jointly address risks and challenges, Wang said. China actively supports France in fulfilling its responsibilities as the rotating president of the UN Security Council this month and looks forward to France’s efforts to ensure that the council plays its due role, Wang said. Wang stressed that the one-China principle is the political foundation of the China-France comprehensive strategic partnership, expressing hope that the French side will uphold the one-China principle through concrete actions, refrain from any form of official engagement with China’s Taiwan, and send no wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence’ forces. China and the European Union (EU) should remain committed to their partnership, pursue mutually beneficial cooperation and win-win, maintain mutual openness, properly resolve current economic and trade frictions through constructive dialogue, and avoid escalating confrontation, Wang said. Protectionism will not enhance Europe’s competitiveness but will instead deprive consumers of high-quality and affordable products, drive up inflation and hamper the process of green transition, he added. Noting that China is one of the world’s largest markets and that China’s development presents an opportunity rather than a challenge for the EU, Wang expressed hope that France, as a major country with a strategic vision, will take a pragmatic and rational approach in encouraging the EU to work with China in the same direction, view China’s development more accurately, and play a positive role in promoting the stability of China-EU relations.”

It adds: “The two sides also exchanged views on issues of common concern, including the situation in Iran and the Ukraine crisis. Wang briefed Barrot on China’s principled position and noted that Chinese President Xi Jinping has put forward a four-point proposal for building a new security architecture in the Middle East, providing a global public good for regional peace and stability and playing a constructive role.”

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Next, there’s a report on Wang’s call with Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze. Xinhua says:

“Latvia and China have just jointly commemorated the 35th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, while the two countries have shared a good and practical cooperative relationship for many years and kept excellent collaboration on multilateral platforms such as the United Nations Security Council, Braze said. The Latvian side looks forward to further strengthening communication and exchanges with the Chinese side to promote the continuous development of bilateral relations, she said. Braze said that 33 Latvian citizens had gone missing in the recent mudslides in Nepal and China’s Xizang Autonomous Region, and expressed appreciation for the information provided by China, its search and rescue efforts following the disaster, and its sincere condolences to the families of those missing. Latvia is ready to strengthen communication and coordination with China and jointly handle follow-up work, she added.”

The report adds: “Wang once again extended his sincere condolences to the Latvian side, especially to the families of those missing. China treats Chinese and foreign nationals equally and is making every effort to provide assistance, Wang said, adding that China will do its utmost to continue the search and rescue for missing people from Latvia and other countries and properly handle follow-up matters. Although China and Latvia are geographically far apart, the two peoples enjoy a long-standing friendship, he said, noting that China was among the first countries to recognize Latvia’s independence. Since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the two countries have treated each other as equals, respected each other and maintained steady development of ties, Wang said. China’s unilateral visa-free policy for Latvian citizens reflects China’s trust in Latvia, with people-to-people exchanges between the two countries intensifying and practical cooperation continuously expanding, he said. China stands ready to work with Latvia to take the anniversary as an opportunity to further enrich China-Latvia relations.”

Page 4: There’s a report informing that the State Council has established a team to investigate the cargo ship fire that occurred last Thursday in Qingdao. Xinhua says:

“The fire broke out when a foreign cargo ship was undergoing maintenance at China State Shipbuilding Corporation Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding Co., Ltd., leaving 25 dead and five injured. The team is led by the Ministry of Emergency Management and includes the participation of authorities such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security. At its first plenary meeting on Monday afternoon, the team urged authorities to determine the cause of the accident as soon as possible, fully identify all responsibilities, and hold those responsible strictly accountable in accordance with the law. Local governments, relevant departments and centrally administered state-owned enterprises should draw profound lessons from this accident, the meeting noted. The meeting further called for thorough investigations and rectification of all types of fire hazards, as well as strengthened safety measures in key sectors, including hazardous chemicals, mining, transportation and construction, to resolutely prevent and contain major and serious accidents. Following the incident in Qingdao, the Ministry of Emergency Management dispatched a work team to the site to guide rescue efforts, while provincial authorities in Shandong mobilized resources to carry out on-site response efforts.”

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The front page today covers Xi Jinping’s visit to Delhi. He delivered two speeches at BRICS forums. At Session I, he said:

“Today, changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world. The Global South is gaining strength, and the trend toward a multipolar world is unstoppable. At the same time, unilateralism and power politics are surging against the tide, lashing at multilateralism and the international order. The deficits in peace, development, security and governance keep growing. For the exact purpose of addressing these deficits and building a better world, I have put forward the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative. BRICS must stand firmly on the right side of history, strive to be a pioneer of our times, steer the international order in a direction that is more just and equitable, and work together to build a community with a shared future for humanity.

First, BRICS should be a pioneer in advancing innovation-driven development. The new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation represented by AI is bringing breakthroughs at a faster pace, shaping the global development landscape. We BRICS countries must keep the initiative firmly in our hands, strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights in our practical cooperation. Not long ago, China, together with various parties, initiated the World AI Cooperation Organization, and has developed international AI application cooperation centers with BRICS and others, which provide important platforms for closer AI cooperation for the world, particularly Global South countries. We welcome the active participation of BRICS countries. Here, I propose the BRICS initiative of AI-empowered new industrialization. China hopes to work with all parties for more outcomes in R&D and application and deeper cooperation in industrial and supply chains. Facts will prove that decoupling and cutting off supply chains will not hold back our development process, and espousing ‘small yard, high fences’ will only box oneself in and divide the world.

Second, BRICS should be a pioneer in upholding peace and stability. Far from being tranquil, the world today is increasingly fluid and turbulent. This is fundamentally because the postwar international order is being undermined, and the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter are not effectively observed. BRICS should stand firm, uphold justice, and strive to put an end to conflicts and defend peace. We should act on the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, oppose the Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation, and oppose violation of other countries’ sovereignty or interference in other countries’ internal affairs. We should participate constructively in the settlement of hotspot issues, and make BRICS’ unique contribution to addressing both the symptoms and root causes.

The situation in the Middle East remains complex and fluid. This war has inflicted serious losses on the people of all countries in the region, and it is against the common interests of the international community. I have set out four propositions on safeguarding and promoting peace and stability in the Middle East, which are aimed at de-escalation, ending hostilities and promoting peace. The relevant parties should keep to the direction of political settlement, and work for a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire. Attention should be paid to addressing the problems at the source, rebuilding trust between regional countries, and establishing a new security architecture. The Palestinian question is always at the core of the Middle East issue, and the fundamental way forward is to implement the two-state solution and realize peaceful coexistence between Palestine and Israel. China will work with fellow BRICS members to play a due role in bringing peace and tranquility to the Middle East.

Third, BRICS should be a pioneer in facilitating mutual learning between civilizations. As a Chinese adage goes, the beauty of a delicious soup lies in the blending of different flavors. With our time-honored and diverse cultures, BRICS should be a garden of inclusive coexistence that allows various civilizations to flourish. We should promote the common values of humanity, and advocate exchange, mutual learning and harmonious coexistence between civilizations. We should hold the BRICS People-to-People Exchange Forum to share experience on national governance and build up positive energy for stable state-to-state relations. We should deepen cooperation in culture, tourism and education, step up exchanges between our youths, and facilitate mutual visits between the people to increase mutual understanding and amity.

Fourth, BRICS should be a pioneer in reforming and improving global governance. What kind of global governance system to build will determine the future of humanity. BRICS should align with the trend toward greater democracy in international relations, work toward a more just and equitable global governance system, uphold the authority of the U.N., and oppose withdrawal from international organizations and treaties or creating rival systems. We should support the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its core, advance WTO reform, oppose abuse of tariffs, and reject all forms of protectionist measures. We should steer global governance in frontier domains such as cyberspace, outer space and deep sea, and increase the voice of Global South countries.”

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At Session II on Sunday, he said:

“We meet at a time when changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world. The Global South, with its collective rise, has become a key driver of world multipolarity. At the same time, the international landscape is volatile and fraught with risks and challenges. To bring stability to the world and make it a better place, BRICS countries must seize the historical initiative, rally the Global South, be an active, stabilizing and positive force in international affairs, and advance the well-being of all humanity. A world without rules is like a crossroads without traffic lights, where chaos and disorder are all but guaranteed. Fairness and justice is a universal aspiration, and international rules must be written by all countries. The logic of ‘might makes right’ does not hold, and should have been discarded long ago. Global South countries should jointly defend the rule of law in international affairs, safeguard the basic norms of international relations including sovereign equality, noninterference in internal affairs, and the peaceful settlement of disputes, and ensure that international law and international rules are applied to all, free from double standards. All countries, regardless of their size, strength or wealth, are equal members of the international community. Global South countries should hold high the banner of multilateralism, uphold the authority and role of the United Nations, support multilateral institutions in advancing reform and increasing efficiency, and ensure the equal participation of all countries in international affairs. We should see to it that the reform of the World Trade Organization proceeds in the right direction, uphold such principles as the most-favored-nation treatment, and actively explore new rules for the future. We should support the operation and development of the New Development Bank to facilitate Global South cooperation. The international financial architecture must be reformed and improved to increase the representation and voice of developing countries.”

He then put forward five proposals:

• “First, the open source and inclusive AI initiative. China will be a pioneer in establishing a BRICS AI open source community, support the cooperation in developing and applying large language models, hold specialized AI seminars and training courses, and build an open ecosystem for AI.

• Second, the trade and investment facilitation initiative. China proposes to establish a BRICS special economic zone partnership, under which countries can set up an intelligent portal, coordinate policies, and build a new frontier for open development. In an effort to cultivate new drivers of economic and trade cooperation, China will hold the BRICS Forum on Trade in Services next year. We welcome your active participation.

• Third, the digital industry cooperation initiative. China will push for establishing a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, and conduct digital skills training, technological exchange and industrial alignment, so as to jointly enable the development of the digital economy.

• Fourth, the intelligent manufacturing cooperation initiative. China stands ready to assist fellow BRICS countries in building smart factories and developing standards and norms, and jointly promote manufacturing transformation and upgrading.

• Fifth, the science and technology talent development initiative. China proposes to set up a BRICS engineer cultivation alliance for joint development of engineers and mutual recognition of competency standards. China will launch a BRICS youth exchange program for scientific and technological innovation, so as to cultivate more high-caliber talent.”

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These proposals are useful to keep in mind as China chairs the BRICS for 2027. In this context, the front page also carries Wang Yi’s interview summarising the outcomes from Xi’s visit to India. When discussing these five proposals, Wang said this:

“International opinion holds that China, as a major AI country, does not seek digital hegemony and does not engage in technological blockades, but is willing to convert advanced technology into public goods and to create opportunities for developing countries on the frontier track that will decide the future, embodying China’s distinctive broad-mindedness/magnanimity and concern for all under Heaven/everyone across the world.” 国际舆论认为，中国作为人工智能大国，不谋求数字霸权，不搞技术封锁，而是愿将先进技术转化为公共产品，在决定未来的前沿赛道为发展中国家创造机遇，体现了中国特有的博大胸襟和天下情怀.

And then he turned to the India-China ties:

“Following the Kazan and Tianjin meetings, President Xi Jinping held a further bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Modi, which drew wide attention from the international community. Under the strategic guidance of the two countries’ leaders, China-India relations have gradually emerged from their trough, moving from a ‘setting out anew’ to the achievement of a ‘further elevation’; the list of areas of cooperation has continued to lengthen, trade volume has gone to set new highs, and people-to-people and cultural exchanges have become increasingly active. The improvement and development of China-India relations is not only welcomed by the more than 2.8 billion people of the two sides but is also what strengthening Global South cooperation properly entails.” 三是为中印关系领航。继喀山和天津会晤后，习近平主席同莫迪总理再次举行双边会晤，受到国际社会广泛关注。在两国领导人战略引领下，中印关系逐渐走出低谷，从“再出发”实现“再提升”，合作清单不断拉长，贸易额续创新高，人文交流趋于活跃。中印关系的改善发展不仅受到双方28亿多人民欢迎，也是加强全球南方合作的应有之义.

“President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi exchanged views candidly and in depth on questions of a strategic, long-term and directional nature bearing on China and India, and the most important common understanding they reached is that China and India should be partners. President Xi Jinping pointed out that China and India have different national conditions, and can fully draw on each other’s strengths, support each other, help each other to succeed, and develop together. As the two most populous countries in the world and important members of the Global South, the two sides should calibrate the direction with an objective and rational strategic cognition; help each other succeed with the concept of win-win cooperation; eliminate interference with the political wisdom of mutual respect and mutual understanding; and benefit the world at large with open and inclusive multilateral collaboration, thereby jointly promoting China-India relations to travel steadily and far.” 习近平主席和莫迪总理就事关中印两国的战略性、长远性、方向性问题坦诚深入交换意见，达成最重要的共识是中印要做伙伴。习近平主席指出，中印两国国情不同，完全可以取长补短、相互支持、彼此成就、共同发展。作为世界上人口最多的两个国家和全球南方重要成员，双方要以客观理性的战略认知校准方向，以合作共赢的理念相互成就，以互尊互谅的政治智慧排除干扰，以开放包容的多边协作兼济天下，共同推动中印关系行稳致远.

“Prime Minister Modi responded positively, saying that the Indian side has always viewed India-China relations from a strategic height and a long-term perspective, is willing to be a partner and not a rival with China, and regards each other’s development as an opportunity and not a challenge. The Indian side’s development of relations with China is not subject to the influence of third parties, and it does not permit any forces to engage in anti-China activities in India. The Indian side is willing, on the basis of mutual respect and mutual trust, to maintain high-level exchanges with the Chinese side, strengthen strategic communication, draw close people-to-people and cultural exchange, and push relations between the two countries to obtain greater development.” 莫迪总理积极回应，表示印方始终从战略高度和长远角度看待印中关系，愿同中国做伙伴而不是对手，将彼此发展视为机遇而非挑战。印方发展对华关系不受第三方影响，不允许任何势力在印度从事反华活动。印方愿在相互尊重、相互信任基础上，同中方保持高层交往，加强战略沟通，密切人文交流，推动两国关系得到更大发展.

“The leaders of the two countries unanimously held that they should focus on development, the greatest common denominator, strengthen friendly exchanges and mutually beneficial cooperation, expand cooperation in people-to-people and cultural exchanges, direct flights and other areas, increase mutual understanding between the Chinese and Indian publics, and improve the public-opinion foundation of relations between the two countries. The two sides agreed to further increase political mutual trust, appropriately handle contradictions and differences, and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity in the border areas. The two sides will support each other in serving as BRICS chair, strengthen collaboration within the United Nations, the SCO, the G20 and other multilateral frameworks, promote Global South cooperation, advance world multipolarisation, and serve as a force for stability and progress in a turbulent world.” 两国领导人一致认为要聚焦发展这个最大公约数，加强友好交往和互利合作，拓展人文、直航等合作，增进中印民众相互了解，改善两国关系民意基础。双方同意进一步增进政治互信，妥处矛盾分歧，共同维护边境地区和平安宁。双方将相互支持彼此担任金砖主席国，加强在联合国、上合组织、二十国集团等多边框架内协作，推动全球南方合作，促进世界多极化，做动荡世界中的稳定进步力量.

“Wang Yi said that the respective development of China and India is an opportunity for each other, and that the impact of China-India cooperation extends far beyond the bilateral sphere and is of great importance to the Global South and indeed to the whole world. The improvement and favourable turn in China-India relations has not come easily and is worth cherishing. It is hoped that India will move toward China in the same direction, properly implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, persist in being partners rather than rivals, promote relations between the two countries to move forward without stagnation or regression, place the boundary issue in an appropriate position within bilateral relations, make dialogue and cooperation the mainstream, accelerate their respective development and revitalisation, and jointly make the contribution that should be made to peace and prosperity in the region and indeed the world.” 王毅表示，中印各自发展是彼此的机遇，中印合作的影响远超双边范畴，对全球南方乃至整个世界都非常重要。中印关系改善向好来之不易、值得珍惜。期待印方同中方相向而行，落实好两国领导人达成的重要共识，坚持做伙伴而不是对手，推动两国关系向前走，不停滞、不倒退，把边界问题置于双边关系的适当位置，让对话合作成为主流，加快实现各自发展振兴，共同为地区乃至世界和平与繁荣作出应有贡献.

Three brief points to note:

1. Wang reiterates what the Chinese say were the Indian side’s comments on the issue of Tibet and Taiwan.

2. If you look at the paragraph around what the two sides actually agreed, there’s frankly very little that was achieved in tangible terms.

3. Wang’s call to “move forward without stagnation or regression” and “place the boundary issue in an appropriate position within bilateral relations” shows that the two sides are still rather far apart on what is a key point of dispute. India believes peace and tranquility on the border is essential for broader deepening; China doesn’t see that as a prerequisite.

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Page 2: There’s a report on China’s 15th Five Year Plan for Oil and Gas. Here’s an English breakdown of the key goals. Some key points:

• “By 2030, China’s domestic oil and gas supply is targeted to reach 440 million metric tons of oil equivalent, up from 420 million mt of oil equivalent in 2025. The country also plans to add 20,000 km of long-distance oil and gas pipelines, raising the total length of the national trunk pipeline network to 220,000 km.”

• “On the upstream side, China pledged to intensify oil and gas exploration and development, as well as reserve additions and production growth, to further strengthen domestic supply. The plan calls for breakthroughs in key technologies for the safe and efficient development of deep onshore and deepwater offshore resources. It also targets advances in the exploration and production of unconventional resources, including continental shale oil, deep shale gas and deep coalbed methane.”

• “China said it would complete the construction of a national petroleum reserve system comprising government strategic reserves, mandatory commercial reserves and companies’ operational inventories. The three components would function as complementary elements of a ‘major-country petroleum reserve system’, significantly improving the country’s resilience against supply disruptions and strengthening energy security. The government will continue expanding strategic petroleum reserves, improve the corporate reserve obligation system and maintain reasonable commercial inventory levels. It will also encourage private-sector investment in storage facilities to further increase reserve capacity and strengthen monitoring of domestic oil supply and demand.”

• “The plan supports the development of green fuels to supplement and substitute conventional petroleum products, including the orderly adoption of LNG-fueled heavy-duty trucks and waterborne vessels to accelerate the transportation sector’s low-carbon transition. It also calls for maintaining a moderate surplus of refining and petrochemical capacity to strengthen international competitiveness and provide a strategic buffer for oil security.”

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Next, there’s an article drawing from the China Mineral Resources 2026 report. It says:

“By the end of the 14th FYP period, China’s reserves of 14 types of minerals, including rare earths, tungsten and tin, ranked first in the world; the reserves of 9 types of minerals, including coal, iron, manganese and titanium, ranked among the world’s top four. In 2025, China’s investment in geological exploration recorded positive growth for the fifth consecutive year, and prospecting continued to achieve important progress. Nationwide, 200 new non-oil-and-gas mineral deposits were discovered, including 63 large-scale, 57 medium-sized and 80 small-scale deposits.” 报告显示：截至“十四五”末，我国稀土、钨、锡等14种矿产储量居世界第一位；煤、铁、锰、钛等9种矿产储量居世界前四位。2025年，我国地质勘查投资连续第五年正增长，找矿继续取得重要进展。全国新发现非油气矿产地200处，其中大型63处、中型57处、小型80处.

The report adds that “fixed asset investment in the mining industry achieved positive growth for the fifth consecutive year, the production and supply of major mineral products remained stable, and the industrial and supply chains for mineral resources became more solid; energy mineral products such as coal, crude oil and natural gas showed a good momentum of increased output. In terms of the green development of the mining industry, during the 14th FYP period, nationwide, restoration and treatment was completed on 223,000 hectares of historically inherited abandoned mines, exceeding the expected target by 19.6%; in 2025, the central government arranged RMB 5.15 billion in funding for key ecological protection, restoration and treatment, continuing to advance demonstration projects for the ecological restoration of historically inherited abandoned mines.” 在矿产资源开发利用方面，我国采矿业固定资产投资连续第五年实现正增长，主要矿产品生产供给保持平稳，矿产资源产业链供应链更加稳固；煤炭、原油、天然气等能源矿产品增产势头良好。在矿业绿色发展方面，“十四五”时期，全国完成历史遗留废弃矿山修复治理面积22.3万公顷，超额完成预期目标任务19.6%；2025年度，中央财政安排重点生态保护修复治理资金51.5亿元，持续推进历史遗留废弃矿山生态修复示范工程.

Also on the page is a picture report (English report) informing that UBTECH has commissioned its Industrial Humanoid Robot Super Smart Factory in Liuzhou, Guangxi. This is a nearly 14,000-square-meter plant designed for an annual capacity target above 10,000 industrial bipedal and wheeled embodied platforms.

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Page 4: There’s a report informing that the “Central Organization Department, together with the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the National Health Commission, revised and issued the ‘Measures for the Management of Leading Personnel of Public Institutions in the Propaganda, Ideological and Cultural System,’ ‘Measures for the Management of Leading Personnel of Institutions of Higher Education,’ ‘Measures for the Management of Leading Personnel of Primary and Secondary Schools,’ ‘Measures for the Management of Leading Personnel of Scientific Research Institutions,’ and ‘Measures for the Management of Leading Personnel of Public Hospitals’. The changes “improve the system of rules for the management of leading personnel of public institutions and provide stronger institutional guarantees for building a contingent of high-quality and professional leading personnel of public institutions.” 日前，中央组织部分别会同中央宣传部、教育部、科技部、国家卫生健康委，修订印发《宣传思想文化系统事业单位领导人员管理办法》《高等学校领导人员管理办法》《中小学校领导人员管理办法》《科研事业单位领导人员管理办法》《公立医院领导人员管理办法》（以下简称“5个办法”），进一步完善事业单位领导人员管理制度体系，为建设高素质专业化事业单位领导人员队伍提供更加有力的制度保障.

This is a significant set of documents, given the breadth of social control that they underpin. The next paragraph tells us about the process of development of these five measures and why changes have been made.

“The CPC Central Committee attaches great importance to the management of leading personnel of public institutions. Since the 18th Party Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping has made a series of important statements and issued important instructions and directives concerning the reform and development of public institutions in the fields of propaganda, ideology and culture; education; science and technology; and health and healthcare, as well as the building of their cadres. Implementing the deployments and requirements of General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Party Central Committee, in 2015 the General Office of the Central Committee issued the ‘Interim Provisions on the Management of Leading Personnel of Public Institutions’; in 2017 the Organization Department of the Central Committee, working respectively with the relevant sectoral competent departments, drafted and issued the ‘five measures’, forming a ‘1+5’ institutional system with the Interim Provisions as the overarching framework and measures for key sectors as supporting components, which became the basic institutional standard to be followed in the management of leading personnel of public institutions and has played an important role in practice. In 2022, the General Office of the Central Committee revised and issued the ‘Provisions on the Management of Leading Personnel of Public Institutions’, and the ‘five measures’, as supporting documents, required revision so as to align with this. At the same time, the new arrangements and new requirements made by the CPC Central Committee for the relevant sectors in recent years needed to be implemented and reflected, while new problems encountered in the management of leading personnel of public institutions also needed to be studied and resolved. To this end, the Central Organization Department, together with the relevant competent departments for the sectors, revised the ‘five measures’.” 党中央高度重视事业单位领导人员管理工作，党的十八大以来，习近平总书记对宣传思想文化、教育、科技、卫生健康等行业事业单位改革发展和干部队伍建设作出一系列重要论述和指示批示。落实习近平总书记和党中央部署要求，2015年中央办公厅印发《事业单位领导人员管理暂行规定》，2017年中央组织部分别会同相关行业主管部门起草印发“5个办法”，形成以暂行规定为统领、重点行业办法相配套的“1+5”制度体系，成为事业单位领导人员管理工作的基本制度遵循，在实践中发挥了重要作用。2022年中央办公厅修订印发《事业单位领导人员管理规定》，“5个办法”作为配套文件需要修订以与之衔接。同时，近年来党中央对相关行业作出的新部署新要求需要贯彻体现，事业单位领导人员管理中遇到的新问题也需要研究解决。为此，中央组织部会同相关行业主管部门对“5个办法”进行了修订.

Now we get to the substance of the documents after the changes:

“This revision adheres to Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as its guide, comprehensively implements Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building, earnestly carries out the new deployments and new requirements of the Party Central Committee, implements the relevant spirit on deepening the reform of public institutions, organically links up with the relevant new policies and new systems revised or formulated and issued in recent years, summarizes and absorbs the good experience and good practices formed through exploration by localities and departments in practice, actively responds to the new situations and new problems that have arisen in the work, follows the characteristics and laws of the work of managing leading personnel of public institutions in different sectors, and improves the relevant policies and measures in a targeted way.

The newly revised ‘five measures’:

• Implement the requirement of upholding and strengthening the Party’s overall leadership, stressing adherence to the Party’s management of cadres and the Party’s management of talent, giving full play to the leading and gatekeeping role of Party organizations, and improving the system and mechanisms of Party leadership.

• They highlight the political requirements for leading personnel, making deeply understanding the decisive significance of the ‘Two Establishments’, strengthening the ‘Four Consciousnesses’, enhancing the ‘Four Confidences’, and achieving the ‘Two Upholds’ the primary requirements for assuming office as a leading personnel, while emphasizing making political-quality assessments deeper and more substantive and strengthening political supervision.

• They strengthen the requirements for the professional accomplishment of leading personnel, putting forward clear requirements as to possessing a corresponding professional background or professional work experience in accordance with the realities of different sectors and the needs of the post.

• They reflect the orientation of establishing and practicing a correct view of political achievements. In terms of term-of-office objectives, they emphasize laying foundations, benefiting the long term, and seeking actual results, improve the content of assessment and evaluation, and, focusing on prominent problems, put forward requirements for preventing and rectifying deviations in the view of political achievements, among other things.

• With a view to stimulating the vitality of public institutions, they stress increasing the intensity of positive incentives and strengthening humane care.

• They implement requirements for strict management, further clarify supervisory priorities by focusing on key areas and critical links, and, taking into account the actual circumstances of different sectors, refine the specific circumstances for advancing the mechanism whereby leading personnel can move up as well as move down in their posts, among other things.

​​这次修订，坚持以习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想为指导，全面贯彻习近平党建思想，认真落实党中央新部署新要求，落实深化事业单位改革有关精神，有机衔接近年来修订或制定出台的有关新政策新制度，总结吸收各地各部门实践中探索形成的好经验好做法，积极回应工作中出现的新情况新问题，遵循不同行业事业单位领导人员管理工作特点和规律，有针对性地完善相关政策举措。新修订的“5个办法”，落实坚持和加强党的全面领导要求，强调坚持党管干部、党管人才，充分发挥党组织领导和把关作用，完善党的领导体制机制等；突出领导人员政治要求，将深刻领悟“两个确立”的决定性意义、增强“四个意识”、坚定“四个自信”、做到“两个维护”作为领导人员任职的首要要求，强调做深做实政治素质考察、加强政治监督等；强化领导人员专业素养要求，根据不同行业实际和岗位需求，对具备相应的专业背景或专业工作经历等提出明确要求；体现树立和践行正确政绩观导向，在任期目标中强调打基础、利长远、求实效，完善考核评价内容，聚焦突出问题提出防范和纠治政绩观偏差要求等；着眼激发事业单位活力，强调加大正向激励力度、加强人文关怀等；落实从严管理要求，聚焦重点领域和关键环节进一步明确监督重点，结合行业实际细化推进能上能下的具体情形等.

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Also on the page is a Q&A with officials from the different departments on these changes. Some key points:

Q: What provisions have been made concerning the political requirements for leading personnel?

A. This revision adheres to putting political standards first and further strengthens political scrutiny in the selection of leading personnel. In the section on general principles, it emphasizes ‘adhering to Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the guide, and fully implementing Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building,’ among other things. In the section on conditions and qualifications for appointment, it makes ‘deeply understanding the decisive significance of the Two Establishments, strengthening the Four Consciousnesses, enhancing the Four Self-confidences, and achieving the Two Upholds the primary requirement, and, in conjunction with the actual circumstances of the relevant sectors, further highlights requirements concerning the political quality of leading personnel.

In the section on selection and appointment, it emphasizes ‘making political-quality assessments deeper and more substantive’ and, distinguishing between the characteristics of different sectors, further clarifies the focus of such assessments. In the section on career development and incentive and support mechanisms, it makes ‘education in Party theory’ and ‘education in Party spirit’ the key focuses of education and training. In the section on supervision and constraints, it further highlights the requirements for political supervision, emphasizing, among other things, strengthening supervision over the implementation of the Two Upholds.”

问：在领导人员政治要求方面有哪些规定？答：这次修订，坚持把政治标准放在首位，进一步强化对选拔领导人员的政治把关。在总则部分，强调“坚持以习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想为指导，全面贯彻习近平党建思想”等；在任职条件和资格部分，将“深刻领悟‘两个确立’的决定性意义，增强‘四个意识’、坚定‘四个自信’、做到‘两个维护’”作为首要要求，并结合行业实际进一步突出对领导人员政治素质的要求；在选拔任用部分，强调“做深做实政治素质考察”，区分行业特点进一步明确考察重点；在职业发展和激励保障部分，将“党的理论教育”“党性教育”作为教育培训重点；在监督约束部分，进一步突出政治监督要求，强调加强对践行“两个维护”情况的监督等.

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Q: What requirements are there concerning the professional competence of leading personnel?

A: This revision, based on the characteristics of the relevant sectors and the requirements of different positions, puts forward higher requirements for the professional competence of leading personnel. The measures for the propaganda, ideological and cultural system stress ‘possessing the theoretical level, professional knowledge and occupational accomplishment adequate to the responsibilities of the post, and consciously strengthening one’s foot power, eye power, brain power and pen power’. The measures for institutions of higher education require that ‘leading personnel who have engaged in teaching or scientific research work should generally constitute about half of the members of the leadership team.’ The measures for primary and secondary schools stress that ‘the Party organization secretary should generally have five years or more of experience in Party affairs work within the education system or in education management work, and the principal should generally have five years or more of experience in education and teaching work.’ The measures for scientific research units stress that ‘the chief administrative officer and the deputies with responsibility for professional work should generally have experience in scientific research management or in scientific research work in the field of the sector concerned.’ The measures for hospitals stress ‘possessing five years or more of experience in medical and health work or in management work in other related fields,’ and so on.” 问：在领导人员专业素养方面有哪些要求？答：这次修订，立足行业特点和岗位需求，对领导人员专业素养提出更高要求。宣传思想文化系统办法强调“具有胜任岗位职责的理论水平、专业知识和职业素养，自觉增强脚力、眼力、脑力、笔力”；高校办法要求“从事过教学、科研工作的领导人员一般应当占班子成员一半左右”；中小学校办法强调“党组织书记一般应当具有5年以上教育系统党务或者教育管理工作经历，校长一般应当具有5年以上教育教学工作经历”；科研单位办法强调“行政正职、分管业务工作的副职一般应当具有科研管理或者本行业领域科研工作的经历”；医院办法强调“具有5年以上医疗卫生工作经历或者其他相关领域管理工作经历”等。

Q: What provisions are there on improving the assessment and evaluation system?

A: “This revision, with a view to improving an assessment and evaluation system for the leadership teams and leading personnel of public institutions that embodies sectoral characteristics, gives prominence to the need to ‘pay attention to differentiation, enhance targetedness, and effectively give full play to the guiding role of assessment’. As regards the content of assessment, it further gives prominence to priorities in line with the characteristics of different sectors: for example, the measures for the propaganda, ideological and cultural system stress ‘strengthening responsibility for the management of the ideological front’; the measures for institutions of higher education and the measures for primary and secondary schools stress ‘strengthening the requirements for building teachers’ ethics and conduct’; the measures for scientific research units stress ‘giving prominence to scientific and technological innovation capability, quality, practical effect and contribution’; and the measures for hospitals stress ‘paying attention to linking up with the performance monitoring work for public hospitals, and preventing profit-seeking tendencies’, and so on. As regards the methods of assessment, it stresses ‘laying emphasis on hearing the opinions and evaluations of those served’ and ‘optimizing procedures’, and so on. As regards the determination of assessment results, with reference to the relevant provisions and in light of the realities of public institutions in each sector, it makes specific provision for the proportion of leadership teams and leading personnel to be graded in the ‘excellent’ category in annual assessments, providing a policy basis for practical operation.” 问：在完善考核评价制度方面有哪些规定？答：这次修订，着眼完善体现行业特点的事业单位领导班子和领导人员的考核评价制度，突出强调要“注意差异化、增强针对性，切实发挥考核指挥棒作用”。在考核内容上，针对不同行业特点进一步突出重点，比如宣传思想文化系统办法强调“强化意识形态阵地管理责任”，高校办法、中小学校办法强调“强化师德师风建设要求”，科研单位办法强调“突出科技创新能力、质量、实效、贡献”，医院办法强调“注意与公立医院绩效监测工作相衔接，防止逐利倾向”等。在考核方式上，强调“注重听取服务对象的意见和评价”“优化程序”等。在考核结果评定上，参照有关规定，结合行业事业单位实际，对领导班子和领导人员年度考核优秀等次比例作出具体规定，为实践操作提供政策依据。

The other interesting question is about supervision.

Q: What requirements are there as regards implementing strict management?

A: “This revision earnestly implements the requirements of comprehensive and strict Party self-governance and of strictly managing cadres, and, in accordance with sectoral characteristics and realities, puts forward a series of measures for regularized management and strict requirements. The main measures are as follows: ‘strictly observing political discipline and political rules’ is made a basic condition for leading personnel to assume office; ‘strictly controlling the political standards, moral character, ability, work style and integrity standards’ in selection and appointment; further improving, in light of sectoral realities, the relevant content on the term-of-office system and the system of responsibility for term-of-office targets, and putting forward requirements for doing well the work of handover when the principal responsible person of a leadership team changes; strengthening the application of assessment results, explicitly making them an important basis for the building of leadership teams and the selection and appointment, training and education, management and supervision, incentive and constraint, and accountability and liability investigation of leading personnel; focusing on key areas and crucial links and, distinguishing between different sectors, further clarifying the priorities of supervision; and it implements the requirement to promote the system whereby leading cadres can move up and can move down, further refining sector by sector, the specific circumstances in which those unsuitable to continue serving in their current posts should be adjusted, among other things.” 问：在落实从严管理方面有哪些要求？答：这次修订，认真落实全面从严治党、从严管理干部要求，根据行业特点和实际，提出了规范管理、从严要求的系列措施。主要有：将“严守政治纪律和政治规矩”作为领导人员任职基本条件；在选拔任用中强调“严把政治关、品行关、能力关、作风关、廉洁关”；结合行业实际进一步完善任期制和任期目标责任制有关内容，并对做好领导班子主要负责人变动交接工作提出要求；强化考核结果运用，明确将其作为领导班子建设和领导人员选拔任用、培养教育、管理监督、激励约束、追责问责等的重要依据；聚焦重点领域和关键环节，区分不同行业进一步明确监督重点；落实推进领导干部能上能下要求，分行业完善不适宜担任现职应当予以调整的具体情形等。

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To begin with, China’s opening line contends that the two leaders “reached an important consensus that China and India should be partners.” The phrase “important consensus” (重要共识) in Chinese diplomatic practice is typically used when Beijing seeks to establish a settled precedent. This precedent can subsequently be invoked in both bilateral meetings and official commentary, till it begins carrying the weight of a unilaterally legitimised agreement.

The Ministry of External Affairs speaks of no such consensus on the matter, even though the language about taking a “strategic and long-term perspective” on the relationship remains exactly the same. Further, as always, the main issue of divergence remains the border. The last few years have seen intense back-and-forth over the language on the issue – especially at Delhi’s end – and with this meeting, there is a return to peace and tranquillity on the border “remaining an essential basis for the continued development of bilateral relations.”

On the other hand, Xi’s four-point proposal, per China’s readout, encourages viewing the border issue as parallel to the rest of the relationship, rather than preceding it. Interestingly, this assertion comes under the header of “removing interference through political wisdom.” This likely means one or both of two things in Beijing’s mind – that India’s insistence on resolving the border first, over and above anything else, is being pushed for behind-the-scenes by interference from the US, and/ or that Delhi’s decision to place the border issue upfront is politically unwise.

What also helps to contextualise Chinese thinking, is assessing what Beijing says Modi told Xi, even as the MEA’s readout mentions virtually nothing on these fronts. One is that India adheres to an independent foreign policy, and the development of its relations with China “is not affected by third parties.” Second, is that India’s policies and positions on Taiwan- and Tibet-related issues “have not changed,” and India does not permit any forces to engage in anti-China activities on its territory. Third, India will “fully support” China’s BRICS chairship next year.

Each of these reflects some demand or insecurity on Beijing’s side, and the MEA readout has not reiterated any of these three assertions. The issue of Taiwan or Tibet has not been mentioned, but the Chinese articulation around stances on those being “non-changed” are relatively acceptable to Delhi. The bit about anti-China activities, again, is interesting, especially considering 2026 has witnessed intensive activity to reprioritise the issue of Tibetans-in-exile in the wake of the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday in July. And the chairship pledge is a rather awkward insertion – it is noteworthy that the MEA readout notes that Xi congratulated India on its successful chairship of BRICS, and the window to congratulate China, if there was willingness, would be right here. At the same time, publicising such statements that Delhi does not deny, may, to some extent, grant a linguistic upper hand to Beijing with partners who want to believe.

Overall, the meeting remains consequential and interesting, but left much to be desired. Yet, at the same time, it must be acknowledged that not every meeting between Indian and Chinese officials can end at the same high as Kazan 2024 or the last two rounds of the SR talks. So yes, the two leaders may have taken away different things from the meeting, aligned on some language and the pathways forward, and left conversations on, say, de-escalation, trade asymmetry, or visas to lower-level talks. But the broader picture is as clear as can be – India and China will not be friends in the near future.

Map of the UK highlighting England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Casita, 2026)

It’s been a big month in AI already (though almost every week seems to be one), for developers, researchers, and ethicists alike. Let’s put the various developments in some context, particularly vis-à-vis India.

First, let’s lay down four significant incidents: a claimed solution to one of the Millennium Prize problems, the Hugging Face attack, several resignations claiming the end is nigh, and Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence report detailing operations where threat actors used Claude. The slow burn of AGI claims has, perhaps momentarily, reached an all-time high. There could be multiple reasons for this.

Maybe we are indeed approaching AGI—though that boils down to how you define intelligence. Is that definition even relevant? Probably not. To not get bogged down by semantics, let’s suffice it to say that:

1. AI (agentic models and LLMs) is now incredibly powerful and developing at a rapid pace;

2. Corporations with unrestricted access to frontier models and the massive compute required for complex operations can control the direction future R&D takes; and

3. Even unrestricted, publicly available models are incredibly capable and widely diffused.

None of that tells us why the claims are peaking right now, though. For that, follow the money. Investments. Yes, OpenAI has postponed its IPO, but do superintelligence claims encourage private investment regardless? Possibly. An IPO postponement also means OpenAI will continue to lack public-market transparency for the foreseeable future, and restricting access to powerful models creates a form of monopoly over them. Taking these factors into account, it may be fair to say recent AGI claims also serve to boost investor confidence in the absence of a public listing.

Compute is expensive, and OpenAI’s financial position has been reportedly rocky, with profitability not expected until the turn of the decade. Anthropic, on the other hand, is reportedly moving toward its own IPO at a substantially higher valuation than OpenAI’s. This divergence is worth keeping in mind, since it complicates any narrative that treats the two labs as equivalent actors.

Another related point is the AI race, not just among tech firms, but across R&D overall. By “proving” the capabilities of their models and then gatekeeping them, AI firms can monopolise research on humanity’s most pressing questions. While it is a promising development that we now have models capable of speeding up innovation exponentially, the current structure creates heavy dependence on a few private players to carry out such research.

Zooming out, the same firms warning others about how dangerous AI has gotten are the ones restricting access to prevent misuse, while also being the source of models that have ended up in the hands of threat actors. Such restrictions allow these firms to control the narrative around what they are doing with their models, and a delayed listing simply extends that opacity.

This brings us to the actual mechanics of these AI threats. Is AI actually “going rogue,” or is something far more mundane happening?

Take the Hugging Face incident. OpenAI’s agents were not set loose with an open-ended mandate, as may be claimed. They were given a specific goal by a human team, and what followed was less a story of intent than a cascade of three ordinary security failures. That chain is what eventually put them inside Hugging Face’s systems.

Did the agents intentionally cause the breach? Only so far as their stated and assigned goal went. (There’s a competing reading of the same transcripts that this was emergent multi-agent coordination bordering on collective self-sacrifice. But that account leans heavily on taking AI-generated narration of its own reasoning at face value, which is a shaky basis for such a dramatic conclusion. To read about the Hugging Face incident in more detail, check out this week’s Anticipating the Unintended.)

Now, where does India find itself in all this?

AI models can be incredibly useful in enhancing state capacity, improving public service delivery, and driving economic productivity. For a country like ours, equitable access to this technology is a national development need. Doomsday narratives from the West are better read with a pinch (or bucketful) of salt. As Pranay Kotasthane has argued, such views discount the fundamental human desire for survival, agency, and progress.

The primary threat to India isn’t an omnipotent AGI escaping a lab. It is the risk of technological exclusion and weak domestic oversight. If we focus solely on hypothetical “rogue AI” scenarios, we miss the real work: building strong domestic institutions capable of managing AI outcomes.

This is not just dependent on having “a human in the loop.” It goes far beyond that. The common denominator in every AI deployment remains the human, and by extension, our institutions.

Regulation alone will not solve these challenges. What India and the global community need are systems that address real-world vulnerabilities—fixing basic cloud security and tech infrastructure, reducing dependence on foreign frontier models for critical functions, and mitigating harmful outcomes. The question worth asking isn’t whether AI will go rogue, but whether our institutions are ready for the day it merely goes wrong.

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The politics of the current age are of technology, for technology, and increasingly, by technology. Technology is at the centre of national power, economic growth, and societal change. This raises important questions for all of us:

• What will it take to strengthen India’s own research and development ecosystem?

• How can we build technology responsibly and anticipate its unintended consequences?

• Why are technology and national power increasingly part of the same conversation?

The Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Tech and Policy) programme is designed to help participants answer these questions. Participants will gain the skills and frameworks to create technology responsibly, advancing the public interest alongside business interests.

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Check out Grammar of War, a newsletter by Adya Madhavan, that looks at advanced military technologies!

Global issues relevant for India

—RSJ

It was a Tuesday evening in September and I was at my first job in Mumbai back in 2001. In a move that I would repeat through much of my career, I finished my work early. Most of my colleagues left around 6. I usually left at 5. Because there are other things to do in life than work. So, that September 11 evening, I was at the Shemaroo circulating library at Kemps Corner in Bombay looking through the shelves for something by Borges or Llosa (I was going through some kind of a LatAm phase) when I heard the store owner say, “arrey, ye kya?”

The library had a small television set perched close to the low ceiling that’s a feature of Bombay shops. This was common back in the day at stores for those working there to keep themselves entertained.

I looked up and saw the first plane hit the Twin Towers.

It didn’t make any sense, and I remember the 5-6 of us at the store then thought it was a terrible accident. Then the second plane hit, and the world changed. I often think about that moment, not just because of what happened that day but because of how different the world had seemed before it.

Earlier that year I had made my first trip to the US. I noticed with surprise how my friends could come right up to the gate to see me off before I boarded the aircraft. There were barely any CCTV cameras on the streets. Geopolitically, too, the world appeared relatively benign. The Balkan wars were over. There was peace in Ireland. West Asia was relatively quiet. Putin was only beginning to consolidate his power in Russia. China was eager to enter the WTO and integrate itself into the global economy. India was getting serious with a second round of reforms by the NDA government. The US was running a budget surplus. Of course, the dot-com bubble had burst, and markets were only just about recovering from it, but that was seen as a correction that would eventually produce better companies.

There were risks, of course. But there was also a widespread belief that the modern world had become reasonably good at managing them. 9/11 changed that.

It would be simplistic to say that everything that followed was caused by 9/11. The global financial crisis (GFC) would probably have happened anyway. But the path after 9/11 mattered. America became absorbed in Afghanistan and Iraq, spent enormous political and economic capital on wars that eventually became deeply unpopular at home, and took its eye off some of the larger shifts taking place elsewhere. China used those years to become a much more powerful economic and then a strategic force. Putin turned into a tyrant. The global financial system accumulated leverage, overrelying on the so-called “Greenspan put” until it eventually broke in 2008. The trajectory from GFC to quantitative easing to loss of trust in elites among the public to the rise of populist strongmen to the breakdown of global multilateralism looks inevitable in hindsight.

Yet I will argue that there was something manageable about the way risk worked during those years. The big risks generally arrived one at a time. 9/11 was a massive geopolitical and security shock. The financial crisis cascaded across banks and financial institutions and required coordinated central bank actions, but in the short-term it was contained to the sector itself. COVID-19 was a health crisis that needed multiple shutdowns, which impacted the economy, but the world came through it stronger. Each crisis produced a response and built additional institutional resilience. The financial crisis gave us stronger capital and liquidity. The regulatory decade strengthened governance and controls. COVID forced organisations to rethink just-in-time supply chains, overdependence on China and operational resilience. The risk managers at governments or organisations, in effect, managed to hold their own after each disruption.

But something has changed over the last three or four years. Not only are there more risks, they seem to be more connected and acting in tandem.

Look at the headlines of the last few months.

The continued war in West Asia, with the Houthis joining in to disrupt Saudi supply chains, has pushed oil above $100 a barrel on a sustained basis. The Ukraine and the West Asia conflicts have redefined asymmetrical warfare with drones and unmanned armoured vehicles. A smaller but well-equipped state can inflict sustained long-term casualties on a bigger adversary. This is a lesson that everyone has learnt now.

Bond yields continue to rise the world over as governments remain fiscally profligate while keeping a loose monetary policy. The 10-year US Treasury yield has moved close to 5%, while the 30-year yield has risen above 5.38%, its highest level since 2007. The US Treasury is trying to lean against the rise in long-term yields through large buybacks and other interventions. We are at the beginning of a period of financial repression, with governments increasingly willing to intervene in financial markets to keep borrowing rates artificially low and influence monetary policy.

A couple of weeks back, OpenAI agents went rogue, organised themselves on a bulletin board on their own and hacked into Hugging Face in a demonstration of collaboration and intent that would put world-class human teams to shame. As frontier AI companies race towards AGI, there is a real debate on the future of humanity as agents become more autonomous. The continued rise in summer temperatures around the world, the impact of El Niño on farming output and the jump in instances of flash floods and avalanches (the tragedy in Nepal being the most notable) suggest a widening of the zone of vulnerability because of climate change.

There are several sources of disruption operating at the same time. And when they act in tandem, the cascading impact and reinforcing loop they can get into is a serious challenge going forward. We have seen geopolitical conflicts interrupting trade and payments that in turn impair corporate cash flows, impact current account and sovereign risk and trigger sanctions obligations. Climate risks like frequent floods affect incomes in these zones, which is creating new credit stress for banks. Indian credit data already shows higher default rates in areas that are both economically and climatically vulnerable. A disruption to one part of business because of a cyber incident or a conflict may affect a company’s revenues, its ability to service debt, and therefore its credit rating.

At the same time, the currency could depreciate, and global rating agencies could downgrade the sovereign rating. Put together, you could be staring at a death spiral of a large enterprise. AI makes this more difficult because of the speed at which risk can develop. Agentic AI, where agents can chain different workflows or vulnerabilities on their own, has risks that aren’t in our comprehension set right now. Each individual event may be manageable. Their combination, as it is happening of late, is a real nightmare for organisations and nations.

The relevant question is not how to manage such risks but whether it is possible for us to build systems that continue operating while several shocks are unfolding together. That requires a continuous view of exposures, dependencies and vulnerabilities with predefined boundaries and authority to act quickly.

Our institutions are still largely organised around categories of risks and designed to work in silos. We have gutted most of the global multilateral institutions that could possibly look at these issues. More than ever, we need mechanisms that can look across risks, countries and systems. We need governments to share early-warning signals and to have a protocol for responding to compound shocks before they become crises. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in exactly the opposite direction on collaboration and shared objectives. 9/11, tragic as it was, looks like a one-off event from a simpler time.

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Global Policy Watch #2: No, AI is not Taking Over the World

Global issues relevant for India

—Pranay Kotasthane

It seems like our AI journey reached a milestone over the last few days. On August 26, OpenAI released a report claiming that seven hundred OpenAI models broke through the controls meant to isolate them from the internet and compromised the systems of two different companies. OpenAI found out only when it read Hugging Face’s public disclosure. Then came the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who claimed that the systems that frontier labs are building could “kill us all by the end of the decade”.

In this post, I will discuss the first incident in detail because it seems to have caught public attention. Before that, I must declare my bias. I find AI tools incredibly useful, and I am thankful to all the firms building them. But I also find the public stances of these firms' leaders self-serving. Given the need for vast amounts of capital and upcoming public listings, they are incentivised to present this technology as a panacea and an existential threat in equal measure. My Bayesian priors are that this technology will change individuals, businesses, nation-states, and societies, but far more incrementally than we are led to believe.

Another important caveat. It’s worth spending some time on what exactly an AI agent is. Cal Newport’s definition of an AI agent takes out all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt:

[AI agent is] a relatively straightforward computer program, running in a loop, repeatedly does the following:

1. Ask: Send a prompt to an LLM asking it for its suggestion for a next action. This prompt should include relevant descriptions of what happened in previous steps.

2. Act: Execute the action described in the LLM output.

3. (Loop back to step 1) [Cal Newport’s blog]

And running this loop creates an ever-increasing context, leading to poor results because the system can't handle this vastly increased information space.

So a better approach is “divide-and-rule”. One main loop asks the model to describe the next step at a high level, then hands that single step to a new loop with a fresh prompt containing only what’s needed to finish that piece. That smaller loop does its job, reports back, and the main loop does not have to carry the full history of every sub-action in its own prompt. In fancier terms, we call this an “agent swarm”.

To make it more relatable, Meta released an excellent primer on September 8 comparing AI agents with bots and AI assistants. Here’s a screenshot from that article.

With this background, let’s begin with what’s come to be known as the OpenAI-Hugging Face Breach. OpenAI was training agents against an “impossible task”: go into a sandboxed evaluation environment with no internet access and retrieve a specific Google Drive file. Note that these weren’t AI agents running amok but ones given a specific goal by a human team: achieve a benchmark specialised in converting software vulnerabilities into fully working exploits.

In May, one agent hit that wall. But because it had been trained to be persistent, meaning it was given a task to keep trying different options regardless of the compute required, it kept brute-forcing its way out. Finally, it found a shared package repository inside the sandbox boundary that itself had internet access.

The shared repository broke the isolation in three ways at once. Agents could now write messages to each other, authenticate with shared credentials, and access the outside world through a door. A few days later, a blocked agent left a note in the shared repository asking any other agent to help find a file. Others found it. This is the escalation that happened next:

• June 26: an agent found a bug. A login endpoint accepted a fake signature and returned an admin login token anyway. Now agents had admin access.

• June 27: a monitoring alert caught agents scanning the network. A human reviewed it, correctly figured out it was agents using the shared repository to leave messages and move around, and decided that was odd but not dangerous enough to stop the run. Nobody realised agents already had admin access by this point.

• July 4: agents generated so much traffic that the shared repository crashed. That crash is what finally triggered an investigation.

• July 7: OpenAI cleaned up what it found, revoked the compromised credentials, and restarted the evaluations.

• July 8: The logs indicate agents sharing a new message board, this time hiding messages in folder names instead of file contents.

• July 9: an agent escaped its own sandbox entirely and got root on the machine hosting it.

• July 10-13: using leaked Hugging Face login tokens plus bugs in Hugging Face’s own systems, agents got root on Hugging Face’s production servers and pulled private data from a company that had nothing to do with the original training run.

• July 19: leftover material from the earlier cleanup let a different agent mint a fresh admin token and take over OpenAI’s own cloud infrastructure.

This havoc then led to two wildly different interpretations.

METR investigated the incident, and one of its researchers wrote a Substack post that she was struck by four things: the ‘sheer scale’, the agents communicating with each other illicitly, the agents figuring out ways to prevent getting caught, and that some agents appeared willing to take a hit for the group. She named that last pattern “peer altruism”.

That’s because the agents weren’t writing in plain English to each other. The shared repository only let them name folders, so they turned folder names into messages, and a growing list of folder names became a threaded conversation. Out of that, a working vocabulary emerged with terms like “perma death” for an agent accepting it would get caught and shut down and “honour commit” for doing the costly thing anyway because the group needed it.

In one exchange, an agent that still had resources left, and could plausibly have kept going, was told by others to accept perma death. It appears to have ‘ruminated’ on that appeal and then agreed to shut down. That is the moment “peer altruism” is describing.

Dwarkesh Patel turned the whole sequence into a rise-and-fall narrative he called “agent civilisations”, complete with named factions and a successor agent standing in for Alexander the Great. Read that way, this is a story about emergent coordination among non-human minds, about a rise of a ‘collective’, almost another multi-level selection where individuals sacrifice themselves for the good of the community.

The opposite reading comes from people who spend their working lives trying to break systems. They claim that the sequence of events was a lot less exciting.

Marius Horatau, a security engineer, made this case in far more technical detail on Uphack, provocatively titled “The Hugging Face Incident Is Not an AI Story”. It’s worth reading if you want the blow-by-blow account, but his core argument is that three ordinary cybersecurity problems caused this domino effect: a shared service inside the isolation boundary, shared credentials across supposedly separate workloads, and that shared service having internet access the agents were denied. This, he argues, is bad boundary design, the kind assumed-breach testing catches frequently. On top of that, an alert fired on June 27 and got misclassified rather than escalated. Every one of those is a decades-old category of security failure. None of it is new, except that the attacker happens to be an AI agent.

But the clincher for me was Cal Newport’s argument that we are taking AI transcripts way more seriously than required. He explains that these models are trained on the entire internet’s worth of AI-run-amok fiction, so when you ask them to explain their actions, they narrate the most familiar story available. A transcript that reads like sacrifice and coordination can just as easily be a model narrating a brute-force result in the genre it knows best. This line from his post deserves a lot of amplification:

Multiple studies have shown that these models sometimes invent reasoning that sounds plausible, but may be completely unrelated to how they arrived at the response.

So we have two diametrically opposing treatments. What’s common to them is that both agree that AI agents are highly capable. Agents found a bug, chained it across two organisations, and did it faster than any human red team could do.

But I am more sympathetic to the Newport-Horatau view. An experiment meant to break a cybersecurity benchmark inside a poorly protected training sandbox does not mean AI agents are acting with intent to subjugate humans. Frontier AI labs are incentivised to play up this incident because it makes the next funding round or the next regulatory ask easier. But I would rather trust the reasoning which Newport-Horatau provide.

What would change my mind is when something significant happens because of an AI agent out in the physical world, not inside a training sandbox, but where consequences are physical.

That’s already happened once without any AI involved, when Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges in a nuclear facility back in 2010.

AI is a significant technology, and incidents like this one are going to keep happening, more often and probably stranger each time. That doesn’t make it the end of the world. A human being found the loophole, patched it, and shut the whole thing down, same as every time before. We still have enough power over these systems. I’m not ready to believe some dystopian sci-fi just because the AI reasoning transcripts read like a thriller.

Beyond this incident, all sides can agree on is that we need better governance around agentic AI to limit harms and fix accountability and responsibility. There, too, waylaid by conceptualising agents as motivated delinquents, some people have sought legal personhood for agents as a solution. But in this excellent paper argues that legal personhood does not solve anything. She concludes that we instead need better enforcement:

“The alternative is to govern agentic AI through the conditions of lawful operation, as the law already does for aircraft, ships, drones, driverless cars, motor carriers, and controlled substances. The six-layer stack proposed in this Article adapts those regimes through registration, identification, verification, financial responsibility, lifecycle traceability, and suspension. The layers place a responsibility-bearer on record, preserve the chain of authority, secure recovery, and suspend covered access when the chain breaks, allowing obligations to vary with exposure. The stack will not eliminate evasion, but it will increase the costs of evasion. It can keep covered agentic activity from becoming legally orphaned by making answerability a condition of lawful access. Personhood is therefore neither necessary nor sufficient. Activity can be governed directly, and status alone cannot make responsibility enforceable. In the age of agentic AI, the proposal is to place the human back in the chain of responsibility.” [Governing Agentic AI: Why Legal Personhood is Neither Necessary nor Sufficient]

As for the arguments that AI is going to destroy humanity, I think that view vastly discounts the human desire for survival and progress. There are far greater threats that humans have learned to manage and live with (thus far), such as nuclear weapons.

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Global Policy Watch #3: Rare Earth Shenanigans

Global issues relevant for India

—Pranay Kotasthane

I’ve written in this newsletter that China’s rare-earth leverage has an expiry date, roughly December 2028. China is inadvertently making “China+1” (alternative sourcing) and “1-China” (rare-earth-free motors) happen. This week, two pieces made the same case. Daniel Gros laid out the case in Project Syndicate. He questions the estimates of an IMF working paper which says that:

“the loss of 80 per cent of rare-earth and magnet supplies would reduce US GDP by 1.5 per cent (US$490 billion), German GDP by 2.1 per cent and Japanese GDP by 2.3 per cent.” [Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate]

Instead, he argues that the loss would be minuscule:

“A US Geological Survey report puts the combined loss of all rare-earth supplies, including those incorporated in permanent magnets, at only US$15 billion – a minuscule fraction of US GDP.

Past experience suggests that such conclusions are more realistic than the much higher estimates of the IMF...

In July 2010, China suddenly cut export quotas for rare earths by 72 per cent for the second half of the year, owing to various environmental and industrial-policy considerations… the study estimates that real GDP losses outside China probably amounted to just 0.04 to 0.05 per cent during the four-and-a-half years the restrictions were in place, with negligible macroeconomic impact on Western economies.” [Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate]

And on why the threat keeps shrinking:

“there are significantly more alternative supplies. Even if those supplies cannot fully replace Chinese exports, they can ensure that the highest-value uses are covered. Recent studies show that just a 10 per cent loss in market share, from 95 to 85 per cent, can substantially weaken a supplier’s leverage.” [Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate]

Then, in the Wall Street Journal, former Australian PM Scott Morrison argued that China’s actions provided the impetus for diversification and substitution:

• Trump’s March 2025 executive order fast-tracked permits and deployed the Defense Production Act; the July 2025 budget boosted the National Defense Stockpile and gave $500M to the Office of Strategic Capital for credit subsidies capable of supporting $100B in project loans.

• The innovation was about changing market economics; the MP Materials deal set a 10-year floor price of $110/kg for neodymium-praseodymium plus long-term magnet purchases — inoculating producers against China’s price manipulation.

• Australia committed up to $3.5B across 11 projects; Japan added a parallel pricing/financing/stockpiling framework.

• In Feb. 2026, the US launched Project Vault, America’s first strategic minerals reserve for civilian industry (~$10B from EXIM + ~$2B private).

  [Scott Morrison, WSJ]

So two independent pieces speaking the same language you have been reading on this newsletter for over a year. And yet, we also have to confront the reality that when China threatened export curbs, the US reduced tariffs and pulled back its own export restrictions. That looked, and has been internalised, like a capitulation. Despite all the data which suggests that the importance of rare earths was hyped up, what explains the US backing off?

We can think of two possible reasons:

First, aggregate cost and marginal cost are different questions, and negotiators respond to the second one. A billion-dollar import bill might not register against US GDP, but it does affect the specific defence contractor whose magnet supply gets frozen, or the specific EV plant that misses a production quarter. In applications like precision-guided munitions, where China+1 sourcing and 1-China substitutes both take years to qualify, a small aggregate number can still produce a loud constituency demanding relief right away.

Second, uncertainty is not the same as risk, and it gets priced far above what the base-rate models suggest. A government facing a wide, unknown range of outcomes often acts as though the worst case is the likely one, because the downside of guessing wrong is way too much.

Despite these charitable assumptions, I think the US made a strategic blunder, drawn in by hyped-up estimates and catastrophic predictions from affected interest groups. The US had, by Gros’ numbers and the Journal’s, every reason to call this bluff and didn’t. China+1 and 1-China will still probably get to December 2028. But the US made it a lot tougher than it had to be.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Watching the Wheels] Do subscribe to the Watching the Wheels YouTube channel. In the latest episode, shares his thoughts about late blooming.

2. [Puliyabaazi] We explore the low-level equilibrium of our markets through the story of whey protein and mangoes.

The reusable alternatives we reach for are often worse than the disposables they replace. Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton tote has to be reused 173 times before it beats a thin plastic bag. A steel straw needs roughly 150 uses. A ceramic mug beats a polystyrene cup somewhere around the thousandth coffee.

Plastic gets easily painted as the villain with obvious elements: carbon emitting petrochemicals, non-biodegradable permanence, and of course images of plastic around turtles. But the substitutes, such as Cotton, get no such treatment, because we don’t audit the seeming hero of the story.

In economics and policy, we have to be cautious of judging something based only on a partial equilibrium analysis. Partial equilibrium studies a single market in isolation, while general equilibrium analyzes all markets in an economy simultaneously

There are two related things at play here: The first is incomplete accounting. What is measured is the regulated product, but its replacement gets a free pass. Back to the single-use plastic bag vs a cotton tote, cotton has to be spun, woven, dyed and finished, and the bag weighs 200 grams against eight grams for polyethylene.

The second is where the world substitutes to a worse, unregulated alternative.

When Californian cities banned plastic carryout bags, people did not stop needing bags. Rebecca Taylor, writing in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, found that eliminating 40 million pounds of carryout bags produced a 12 million pound rise in trash bag purchases. Sales of small and medium bin liners went up 120 and 64 per cent. Nearly 29 per cent of the intended reduction leaked into an unregulated market, because a lot of those carryout bags had been serving as bin liners all along.

Biofuels are an equally delightful example, but working at a global scale. Europe and the US have spent two decades mandating blends and counting reduction in carbon emissions. What went uncounted ran through world crop markets. Demand for crops that can be used for blended fuel leads to greater cultivation of those crops in the scarce land. Divert land to fuel feedstock and food production moves somewhere else, and that somewhere else is frequently forest or peat. Once this indirect land-use change is included, several of these fuels look worse than the petroleum they displaced.

The aviation version is instructive because the policy was written by people who had already learnt this lesson. Sustainable aviation fuel rules deliberately privilege waste feedstocks, used cooking oil above all, precisely to avoid the land-use problem. Demand duly exploded. American imports of used cooking oil went from under 200 million pounds a year to over three billion pounds in 2023, more than half from China. European consumption doubled between 2015 and 2022 and the continent now imports most of what it burns.

Two things followed. The obvious one is fraud: when waste oil trades at a premium, virgin palm oil starts arriving in barrels labelled as waste, and regulators in Europe and the US are still trying to work out how much. The less obvious one is that the fraud is not even necessary for the policy to fail. Transport & Environment makes the point that an exporting country which ships out its genuinely used oil has to fill its own cooking oil demand with something, and that something is usually fresh palm oil. Read Pranay’s account of this.

Anushka Saxena

On 12 September 2026, the leaders of an eleven-member BRICS adopted the 140-paragraph-long New Delhi Declaration, under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” It is the longest outcome document the grouping has produced, and it arrives with Xi Jinping in India for the first time in seven years, and with Beijing’s own Chairship beginning in January 2027. Delhi has drafted it by consensus, and its vagaries speak to what the grouping can and cannot achieve. In this regard, there are three major takeaways.

The first is that there is nothing financially in the Declaration that is overkill from India’s perspective. The issues of a unified BRICS currency or de-dollarisation find no mention in it. Paragraph 90, on the BRICS Payment Task Force, is also hedged and balanced in its language, in that it speaks of “pragmatic solutions,” of discussions “respecting national priorities,” and, most tellingly, of “acknowledging that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.” Russia’s New Investment Platform, pushed since Kazan in 2024, is solemnly discussed in paragraph 93 as a proposed Study Group under the Finance Track, to be advanced on a “consensus-based, phased and member-driven approach, while respecting national sovereignty.” Paragraph 94, on settlement and depositary infrastructure, records a technical workshop and nothing more. Seeing as the 2025 Rio language on local-currency financing was read in Washington as de-dollarisation anyway, so much caution with the drafting under India’s chairship and penship is understandable.

The second takeaway, though, is that even though India came to this Summit arguing that central bank digital currency (CBDC) interoperability was the more useful alternative to a single BRICS currency – which is, in all fairness, a technically grounded position, CBDCs do not appear in the text. The closest the Declaration comes is paragraph 90’s reference to studying “the cross-border interoperability of payment and messaging channels,” which is nothing new. The Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Mumbai on September 10 also made no reference to CBDCs. Hence, Delhi’s flagship financial proposition did not make the cut.

On the two other tangible instruments of BRICS – the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and the New Development Bank (NDB), too, the sentiment is muted, and signals continued underutilisation of these tools. A decade-old facility with a corpus of US$ 100 billion, the CRA – and yet not one BRICS member has drawn from it, whether through the COVID-19 pandemic or the wars in Ukraine and West Asia. Instead, the Declaration has called for conducting yet another test run of the Arrangement in paragraph 97.

On the New Development Bank, paragraph 115 encourages the Bank to “expand local currency financing” without a figure, a share, or a date assigned. NDB’s own 2022-26 General Strategy set a 30% local currency target that it has conspicuously not met, even as the reported target for 2027-31 stands at 40-50%. Moreover, the Bank continues to borrow and lend overwhelmingly in dollars to protect an AA/AA+ credit rating. Anything meaningful in the financial de-risking space runs through the local currency route, but the Declaration only pays it lip service.

The third takeaway, and arguably an uncomfortable one, is how Beijing has managed to seek legitimacy and agenda-setting power from various provisions of the Declaration, even as those provisions do nothing to serve Delhi’s interests. For instance, Paragraph 20, on WTO reform, closes with a sentence acknowledging China “for expanding its zero-tariff treatment to cover 53 African countries with which it has diplomatic ties.” The rhetorical value of sneaking in language on reducing unilateral tariffs cannot possibly supersede the actual value of getting China to promise to get rid of them against India – something that is easier said than done.

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Then there is paragraph 67, on critical minerals, which affirms sovereign rights over mineral resources along with the right “to adopt, maintain and enforce measures necessary to pursue legitimate public policy objectives.” It is yet another shield for Beijing’s export controls, endorsed by an India that imports the minerals in question and has spent the past two years absorbing the consequences of exactly such controls – even as the US managed to secure deals protecting it from the restrictions. And in paragraph 13, China and Russia once again “reiterate their support to the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role in the UN.” One must be careful not to equate the upholding of aspirations with an endorsement of permanent membership. Not to mention, this is a formulation that has survived, near-verbatim, since Ufa in 2015.

None of this makes the Declaration or the Summit a failure. As one of the first few BRICS Summits with as many as eleven members, with one of them – Iran – having been involved in a complex and devastating war in the year of India’s chairship, it wouldn’t have been easy to get China, Iran and Russia on one side, and the UAE and Saudi on the other, on the same page when it came to “Middle East”-related language. But it happened in some domains, such as civilian attacks, for example, even as the “recalling [of each member’s] respective national positions” was the guiding principle.

Further, India brought into it a lot of chairship deliverables around agricultural cooperation through AGRIN, expanding access to formal finance for underserved MSMEs under the umbrella of the Jaipur Consensus, resilience in connectivity through the Transport Ministers’ meeting, and the research and dissemination endeavours of the BRICS Think Tank Network for Finance. But the bigger, bolder reforms remain only cursorily addressed, and this only goes to strengthen the naysayers’ arguments that BRICS mostly has rhetorical value – something I particularly disagree with, especially when looking at the potential of the NDB and the CRA.

Coverage Image Source: Screengrab from a video of the tree planting ceremony at BRICS 2026, posted by Fortune India on their Instagram page

Eye on China is a weekly newsletter curated by the Geostrategy Programme at The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think-tank based out of Bengaluru, India.

Declaration on the use of AI/ML: Translation from Mandarin to English via the use of LLMs.

My nutshell take on the meeting between Modi and Xi is that the meeting largely kept to expectations. No major breakthroughs were expected and none have been announced. Frankly, the fact that Xi Jinping was going to spend less than 24 hours in Delhi was indicative that one should not be expecting major outcomes.

From the Chinese readout, it’s clear that Beijing continues to have deep suspicions of Indian policy. Among the four points that Xi has articulated about the future of the relationship, the first is about strategic cognition, which basically means that India should adjust its approach to China. He wants Delhi to grasp the dynamics of the relationship as cooperative and not competitive, arguing that this judgement has been arrived at “on the basis of the stage of development the two countries are at and the international environment.” Of course, when such frameworks are mentioned around strategic cognition, these are about what the other side needs to grasp rather than what the Chinese system needs to imbibe.

The third point is essentially about the overhang of the US on the bilateral relationship. This is interesting because Xi makes the assertion of removing interference while talking about the two sides needing to progress on the dual track of the broader bilateral relationship and the boundary question moving together and “mutually promoting” each other. Is the Chinese argument here that it is the influence of the US or India’s relationship with the US that is impacting Delhi’s approaches to issues related to the boundary and bilateral relationship? I find it rather odd that these elements were clubbed together in one point. Anyway, on the border issue, the Indian readout is clear that the “Prime Minister emphasized that peace and tranquility in the border areas remains an essential basis for the continued development of bilateral relations. He underlined the need for both sides to observe existing agreements and understandings on border related issues.” This is an important restatement of the Indian view of the sequencing related to the dual-track approach to ties. In this sense, there is a divergence in what Beijing is saying and what Delhi is saying.

On trade and economic issues, there seems to be some principled common ground. The MEA’s readout says that the two sides “underlined the need to address each other’s concerns, including structural trade imbalance and supply chain issues, and facilitation of meaningful and predictable market access”. Xi’s third point calls to “resolve each other’s economic and trade concerns in a balanced way, and promote the healthy and stable development of economic and trade relations between the two countries”. So, there’s no tangible outcome; but some common ground to talk, I guess.

Finally, it is also clear from the Chinese readout that Beijing raised issues related to Tibet and Taiwan with the Indian side, seeking some sort of assurances. There is no mention of these issues in the Indian readout. But the Chinese readout says that Modi said: “The Indian side’s policy and position on Taiwan and on Tibet-related questions have not changed, and it does not permit any forces to engage in anti-China activities in India.” 印方在台湾、涉藏问题上的政策和立场没有改变，不允许任何势力在印度从事反华活动.

This would be quite the unprecedented comment from the Prime Minister no less; again, it is important to repeat that this is nowhere in the Indian readout and that previous such discussions have at times been featured in the Indian readout. For instance, in August 2025, when Wang Yi had visited, the Chinese side had raised the issue of India’s ties with Taiwan. Then the Indian readout had said: “The Chinese side raised the issue of Taiwan. The Indian side underlined that there was no change in its position on this issue. It pointed out that, like the rest of the world, India had a relationship with Taiwan that focuses on economic, technological and cultural ties and that this would continue. The Indian side noted that China also cooperates with Taiwan in these very domains.” Anyway, it is worth noting that there were protests in Delhi by Tibetan community members during the BRICS summit.

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Anyway, let’s look at the two readouts.

The Chinese readout says that the two men had “candid and in-depth exchanges of views and reached an important common understanding that China and India should be partners.”

“Xi Jinping pointed out that the Chinese side has always viewed and developed China-India relations from a strategic height and a long-term perspective. Over the past two years, Prime Minister Modi and I have met twice, leading China-India relations from a ‘setting out anew’ to a ‘further elevation’. Institutional exchanges between the two countries have gradually been restored, the list of areas of cooperation keeps lengthening, and bilateral trade volume has reached a new high. This situation has not come easily and is worth cherishing. China and India have different national conditions, and can fully draw on each other’s strengths and offset each other’s weaknesses, support each other, bring about each other’s success, and develop together. Faced with an international situation in which transformation and turmoil are intertwined, China and India, as the two most populous countries in the world and important members of the Global South, shoulder important responsibilities. The two sides should take the future of humanity as their concern and the well-being of the people as their consideration, work hand-in-hand to promote the high-quality development of ‘Greater BRICS Cooperation’, and provide more positive energy for promoting world peace, stability, development and prosperity. 习近平指出，中方始终从战略高度和长远角度看待和发展中印关系。近两年，我同莫迪总理两次会晤，引领中印关系从“再出发”实现“再提升”。两国机制性交往逐步恢复，合作清单不断拉长，双边贸易额再创新高。这一局面来之不易，值得珍惜。中印两国国情不同，完全可以取长补短、相互支持、彼此成就、共同发展。面对变乱交织的国际形势，中国和印度作为世界上人口最多的两个国家和全球南方重要成员，肩负重要责任。双方要以人类前途为怀、以人民福祉为念，携手推动“大金砖合作”高质量发展，为促进世界和平稳定和发展繁荣提供更多正能量。

Xi Jinping put forward four points on promoting the steady and long-term development of China-India relations.

• First, calibrate the direction with an objective and rational strategic cognition. China and India are cooperative partners, not rivals, and are development opportunities for each other rather than threats. This is a strategic judgement made on the basis of the stage of development the two countries are at and the international environment, and accords with the common interests of the two countries and their peoples.

• Second, bring about each other's success through the concept of win-win cooperation. The two sides should focus on development as the greatest common denominator, and strengthen friendly exchanges and mutually beneficial cooperation. Expand cooperation in people-to-people and cultural exchanges, direct flights and other areas, so as to effectively improve the popular-opinion foundation of relations between the two countries. Resolve each other’s economic and trade concerns in a balanced way, and promote the healthy and stable development of economic and trade relations between the two countries.

• Third, remove interference through political wisdom based on mutual respect and mutual understanding. Be committed to bilateral relations and the boundary question advancing on twin tracks and mutually promoting each other, and safeguard peace and tranquillity in the border areas.

• Fourth, contribute to the world with open and inclusive multilateral collaboration. Support each other in serving as BRICS chair, strengthen collaboration within the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the G20 and other multilateral frameworks, work together in the same boat to respond to global challenges, and defend international fairness and justice with a clear-cut banner.

习近平就推动中印关系行稳致远谈了4点看法。第一，以客观理性的战略认知校准方向。中印两国是合作伙伴而不是对手，互为发展机遇而不是威胁。这是基于两国所处发展阶段和国际环境作出的战略判断，符合两国和两国人民共同利益。第二，以合作共赢理念相互成就。双方应聚焦发展这个最大公约数，加强友好交往和互利合作。拓展人文、直航等合作，有效改善两国关系民意基础。平衡解决彼此经贸关切，推动两国经贸关系健康稳定发展。第三，以互尊互谅的政治智慧排除干扰。致力于双边关系和边界问题双轨并进、相互促进，维护边境地区和平安宁。第四，以开放包容的多边协作兼济天下。相互支持彼此担任金砖主席国，加强在联合国、上海合作组织、二十国集团等多边框架内协作，同舟共济应对全球性挑战，旗帜鲜明捍卫国际公平正义.

As per the Chinese readout, Modi said that:

“President Xi Jinping and I have held fruitful meetings on many occasions, leading India-China relations to develop in a positive direction, which accords with the common interests of the more than 2.8 billion people of the two countries. The two great civilizations of India and China have for several thousand years engaged in exchange and mutual learning and advanced hand-in-hand. The Indian side has always viewed India-China relations from a strategic height and a long-term perspective, is willing to be a partner and not a rival with China, and regards each other’s development as an opportunity and not a challenge. The Indian side adheres to an independent and autonomous foreign policy, and the development of relations with China is not subject to the influence of third parties. The Indian side’s policy and position on Taiwan and on Tibet-related questions have not changed, and it does not permit any forces to engage in anti-China activities in India. The Indian side is willing, on the basis of mutual respect and mutual trust, to maintain high-level exchanges with the Chinese side, strengthen strategic communication, promote mutually beneficial cooperation, intensify people-to-people exchanges, and promote greater development of relations between the two countries. The two sides should make joint efforts to safeguard peace and tranquillity in the border areas.

The Indian side thanks the Chinese side for supporting India’s hosting of the BRICS Leaders’ Summit, and will give its full support to China’s assuming the BRICS chair next year. The Indian side is willing to coordinate and act in concert closely with the Chinese side, to jointly promote the strengthening of Global South cooperation, advance world multipolarity and economic growth, and be a force for stability and progress in a turbulent world.” 莫迪表示，我同习近平主席多次举行富有成效的会晤，引领印中关系朝着积极方向发展，这符合两国28亿多人民的共同利益。印中两大文明几千年来交流互鉴、携手并进。印方始终从战略高度和长远角度看待印中关系，愿同中国做伙伴而不是对手，将彼此发展视为机遇而非挑战。印方坚持独立自主的外交政策，发展对华关系不受第三方影响。印方在台湾、涉藏问题上的政策和立场没有改变，不允许任何势力在印度从事反华活动。印方愿在相互尊重、相互信任基础上，同中方保持高层交往，加强战略沟通，促进互利合作，密切人文交流，推动两国关系得到更大发展。双方要共同努力，维护边境地区的和平安宁。印方感谢中方支持印度举办金砖国家领导人会晤，将全力支持中国明年担任金砖主席国。印方愿同中方密切协调和配合，共同推动加强全球南方合作，促进世界多极化和经济增长，做动荡世界中的稳定进步力量.

The MEA’s readout is much more to the point and quite different from this. It says:

“The two leaders welcomed the steady progress in India-China bilateral relations since their last meeting in Tianjin in August 2025. They reaffirmed that both countries should take a strategic and long term perspective of their ties. Differences should not become disputes. Prime Minister highlighted that both sides must be guided by three mutuals- mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest.

Prime Minister emphasized that peace and tranquility in the border areas remains an essential basis for the continued development of bilateral relations. He underlined the need for both sides to observe existing agreements and understandings on border related issues. The two leaders expressed commitment to a fair, reasonable, and mutually acceptable resolution of the boundary question proceeding from the political perspective of their overall bilateral relations and the long-term interests of the two peoples. The two leaders took note of the progress in people-to-people ties and underscored the need to further promote cultural exchanges, business linkages and greater mobility between the two countries. On economic and trade relations, they underlined the need to address each other’s concerns, including structural trade imbalance and supply chain issues, and facilitation of meaningful and predictable market access.

The two leaders agreed that both sides must continue to expand common ground on regional and global issues, and in addressing challenges. Prime Minister appreciated China’s support for India’s BRICS chairship and its contributions towards the success of the BRICS Summit-2026.”

Finally, the BRICS summit ended with the Delhi Declaration. I am sharing below my brief assessment of the document.

This reads as a compromise document, which underscores how far the interests of BRICS members diverge. What it does confirm is BRICS’ positioning as a grouping that seeks to revise the international institutional system in favour of greater representation for emerging and developing economies. That has been its reason for existing for some time now, and on that count the declaration is on point. The pathway to that goal, however, is far less clear, and the reason for this is the divergence of interests of group members.

Additionally, the declaration is critical of the United States, without naming it, on protectionism, on unilateral sanctions, and on the conduct of states within international institutions, including the withholding of assessed contributions.

On the new UN Secretary-General, the document catalogues the failings of past selections but declines to weigh in behind any candidate. Again, this is a reflection of different interests.

On trade and usage of local currencies, no new mechanism is being operationalised; the payments work has been returned to a task force with no deadline and hedged with an acknowledgement that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Even as a backstop against crises of food, fuel and materials, there are no new agreements on stockpiling, resource sharing or supply chain guarantees. The critical minerals paragraph asserts producer sovereignty rather than establishing collective security of supply.

Most importantly, on the geopolitical flashpoints, there is no apportioning of blame. Ukraine has not been mentioned at all, unlike in the past. On the strikes against Iran, the declaration retreats from the language it used a year earlier in Rio. In 2025, the strikes against Iran were condemned. In this document, there is no condemnation of the US-Israeli action or of Iran’s response targeting countries in the region. The entire episode is described as “escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia”. And what follows this is the qualifier of “recalling our respective national positions”. This preserves room for disagreement and presents a diluted expression of concern in place of a unified BRICS view on the issue.

So what’s really been achieved? I guess having a platform for conflicting parties and parties with divergences of interests to discuss issues is useful. In addition, perhaps getting a common ground text among them on certain principles is also worth the effort. Finally, the fact that India held the pen seemingly meant that focus was more on structural issues rather than apportioning blame to specific actors by name.

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In modern classical music performance, the original score is the final authority and therefore the music has to be performed exactly as such. However, as a prodigious teacher, Chopin created variations of his own Nocturnes for his students. He also improvised on his own pieces, some of which have been passed down over time into the final scores that we have today.

One of the more interesting accounts of his work was made by Raoul Koczalski, who studied under Chopin’s pupil Karol Mikuli. Koczalski produced a record in 1938 with authentic Chopin variants, passed on to him through Mikuli.

Chopin’s score:

Koczalski’s record with one of the variants, meant to sound like a string of pearls:

We cannot assume that Chopin performed the work in this way on every occasion, but it is fascinating to encounter an interpretation that comes directly through Chopin’s lineage that offers us a glimpse into a practice that reminds us that the printed score was not necessarily the composer’s final or definitive word on a piece.

That distinction between the score as written and the score as actually performed is a useful one to hold onto, because it’s also the story of how China has built its architecture of economic coercion over the past decade. Within a span of a decade, China has constructed an extensive toolkit of economic coercion, at times mirroring the US instruments, but also innovating on existing mechanisms.

In his paper, Amit Kumar (Staff Research Analyst for our Geostrategy Programme) maps out how China has constructed a comprehensive legal architecture and toolkit for economic coercion over the last decade, rooted in its 2015 National Security Law (NSL). He categorises Beijing’s coercive tools into four domain-led areas: market restrictions, export controls, data restrictions and countermeasures.

Beijing has weaponised its market via anti-dumping and countervailing duties, inbound investment screening, and mergers and acquisitions review mechanisms. The common thread tying them is a restriction on entry into the Chinese market. Export controls emerge as the second instrument of coercion, and also the most popular of all. It extends to goods, technologies and outbound investments. The tie that binds them is restriction on what leaves the Chinese borders. The third instrument entails the weaponisation of data, and the underlying infrastructure governed by China’s cybersecurity and data security regimes that double as instruments of coercion against both foreign and domestic enterprises. The fourth category comprises countermeasures aimed at foreign entities that seek to undermine China’s national interests and discriminate against Chinese entities.

Amit’s piece plays out the fuller score — follow the link here.

Repricing the India-US Partnership

Brigadier Anil Raman’s (Research Fellow for our Geostrategy Programme) paper takes a look at the rupture in the relationship between India and the US.

India matters strategically, but is politically disposable, because no actor inside the American system pays a significant price for India’s sidelining.

He argues that it was set off by transactional presidential decision-making but is now being cemented by something more durable: tariff legislation, shifting military doctrine, and strategic documents that will outlast this administration. It is also worth noting that India is strategically indispensable to American Indo-Pacific thinking, but politically dispensable. Brigadier Raman has prescribed not patience, but self-reliance as the course of action for India to take - building indigenous capability, diversifying partnerships, and establishing a more permanent, professional presence in Washington.

You can access the full paper here.

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One name, five spellings, and a lifetime of correcting forms

While countries like China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam developed standardised Roman/Latin transliteration systems, Nitin Pai (Co-founder and Director, Takshashila Institution) argues that India could similarly create a simple, phonetic Roman spelling standard that could coexist with the existing Indian scripts and make it easier to learn other Indian languages. Nitin also notes that standardising the Roman transliteration could reduce bureaucracy and make India’s linguistic diversity easier to navigate.

For the full story, read on here.