ICS Occasional Papers

This Occasional Paper is based on a research project which looked at various aspects of how the British colonial rulers addressed the issue of defining India’s border with China from 1890 to their departure in 1947.

The Covid-19 pandemic and its impact bear a critical turning point in the history of humankind, demanding a retrospect on preparedness, a relook on reality and a reset of worldview.

This essay is based on P K Banerjee’s (1917–2003) book, My Peking Memoirs of the Chinese Invasion of India (Banerjee 1990), published 14 years after he retired from the Indian Foreign Service (IFS).1 I have my own connection to the story as I reached Beijing in August 1963, spending five months

China’s spectacular growth in the last few decades has led to the accumulation of huge amounts of foreign reserves. The emergence of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) has been another major change in the economic and financial sphere of the world. In 2007, China also decided to invest its..

Since the advent of the internet era, different countries have adopted diverse approaches for the regulation and governance of the cyberspace. These approaches have often been divergent as well as contradictory to each other, causing an unresolved debate for an ideal framework for cyber laws.

Domestic political legitimacy has attracted the attention of many scholars after China adopted the policies of reform and opening up in 1978. The Weberian top-down approach has been a dominant framework in the literature to conceptualize political legitimacy with the electoral representative..

India today faces a ‘triple whammy’: the Covid crisis, the economic downturn and the China challenge. To confront these issues and emerge successful will require a massive and well-considered effort of national mobilisation. The key driver has to be the economic front; only the enhancement of India's

The mobility of Indian students travelling abroad for higher education, has been on the rise since the early 2000s. The favoured destinations have been the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. However, in the last few years it has been observed that China is one of the top non-English speaking countries where Indians are going for higher education, mostly for undergraduate medical courses.

Most of the literature on China’s relations with Middle East begins and ends with oil. As cited by Nigel Thalakada, China is pursuing a 'maxi-mini' strategy, maximizing its security and economic benefits while minimizing its responsibilities. China's insistent urge for peaceful political settlements to ..

China’s deterrent is premised on the survivability and credibility of its nuclear forces. The policy of assured retaliation has allowed it to maintain a relatively small arsenal, stressing on second-strike capabilities for counter-value targeting. However, strides made by the US in precision strike...

US-China tensions can broadly be classified into four major areas: Trade, Technology, Territorial issues (such as Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Regional Connectivity) and Tenets, which allude to values, ideology and the advocacy of particular systems of political and economic governance (T4).

In modern China, even under Mao’s communist era, literature has been regarded as an instrument of political dissent. Two major approaches are required to seriously reflect on how to understand the anatomy of the Fang Fang Phenomenon: one is to view it in the historical context of New