China and India: rivalry, competition, or something else? | Global Eyes

soft power is something that is really Bottoms Up rather than something that is directed by government software is not a zero-sum game I think both can win and both can lose at the same time how are India and China using soft power to improve perceptions about their countries in the region and globally what do these perceptions mean for security policy and what do they mean for you for your life I'm Isha Bhatia I'm senior editor here at Deutsche Weller and I'm William goodcraft security reporter for DW that is a delicate interplay between perceptions and reality especially when it comes to policy and soft power projection and those perceptions are hardening especially in the age of social media this is globalized where we take a new look at security policy we break it down for you so you understand how it affects your life and joining us to look at India China relations we have him and Iran she is a researcher on India China relations joining us in Delhi and palawi I or she is a journalist she has covered China for Indian media joining us now from Madrid you know India and China are of course two very different governments China is an authoritarian uh State and India likes to Bill itself as the world's largest democracy so how does that present itself when for example in your research you know looking at their their influences over Africa you know when it comes to human rights when it comes to promoting democracy is is it somehow different for India than it is for China or is India also just pursuing what it sees as its interests so um I think China also avoids a lot of attraction in African countries precisely just because that China has been able to uplift you know millions of people out of poverty in a matter of few decades without any forced structural adjustment programs so Africa had to go through these saps in the 1980s which did not result um which did not bear any fruit so that part you know does hold a great appeal amongst the African leaders and the policy Elites um that you know how how China was able to you know uplift these millions of people out of our dangerous to matter of few days so the Beijing consensus and the China's model of development holds I think attraction who is appeal amongst the policy and these but if we come to India and talk about India's model of democracy and during an independent judiciaries um you know where there is a considerable existence of the Civil Society and some form of media that also finds resonance I think amongst the Civil Society and the general population so also I think amongst some um you know policy Elites in selected countries uh but you know I think both have their kind of audiences in the continent so I wouldn't say it's just the Indian democracy that holds up in but also it's the Chinese model of development that is also um getting a lot of Attraction so both have their own kind of uh audiences there now India and China they don't seem to have place for each other's journalists right now now as long as I remember even in the worst times even in 1962 there were journalists that were reporting so what has really happened this time around yeah you know when I first moved to China it was back in 2002 and at the time there was one Indian journalist who worked for the Indian government news via PTI now at that time India China treated about 5 billion US Dollars there's not even any direct flights between the two countries and I remember I used to have to take Ethiopian Airlines from Beijing to Addis Ababa with a stopover in Delhi in order to get home but now well you know almost uh 20 years later bilateral trade relations stand at about 136 billion connectivity has greatly improved cross-border relations are both more fragile and more flammable than ever before and these really have a kind of global import um but as you said when you look at the number of Indian journalists on the pound in China it is back to one gentleman who works for PTI so that in some ways this is a classic example of the more things change the more they stayed the same and I think even this last man who is standing right now is in danger of having his uh Visa revoked because there is one Chinese journalist left in India who works for xinhua who is also waiting for a visa extension and essentially what we are looking at are Tit for Tat measures with time one Indian one Chinese journalist's visa is not renewed uh uh India the Chinese then revoke a Visa for an Indian journalist parity so um that's really what we are looking at and uh you know the number of Indian journalists in China and vice versa is soon going to be zero which is a is is perhaps an apt way or being the absolute nadir um that the bilateral relationship seems to have reached yeah it's it's almost like journalists are being treated like diplomats you often hear this Tit for Tat thing a country throws out diplomats of another country so the other country throws a diplomat of their country but here you're seeing this with journalists you mentioned just now the more things change the more things stay the same what accounts for that because as you've pointed out in so many ways China and India are benefiting from stronger relations and in some other ways things are as you said more flammable than ever so what accounts for that that contrast yeah you know I mean essentially the as things have become worse on the Diplomatic front uh resulting from continuing tension on the borders uh we also have seen the emergence in both China and India of a lot of nationalist hysteria of xenophobia uh social media weibo and Twitter sort of becoming increasingly important and it's it's it's it's a it's a crying shame because I think you know on the ground reporting is the only thing that can actually uh in some ways correct the misperceptions that are so rampant on both sides of the Buddha both sides seem to be more interested in what we colloquially call WhatsApp University then in really understanding what the situation on the ground is just talked about misperceptions now you've also briefly been to China for your research how did you see things there what is the perception of people in China about India the Perceptions in China about India have been varying over you know the past few decades and I would say the last few years have been have reshaped uh you know the opinion among the general populace last month I think singhwa University had published a survey which said that um you know the opinions amongst Chinese about India is is gone down to a real Loop uh even below the United States and Japan the percentage has gone down to that Loop so are the perceptions amongst the general population doesn't seem to be much on the positive side and it's been falling to newer lower uh you know ranges uh when I was based in Beijing this was between 2002 and 2009. um so it was a seven year period and one of my main beats really used to be perceptions uh and there was a important visit if you had any Minister going across to China or the Chinese President visiting India which had begun to happen with some regularity in that window of time um I was to be asked to sort of go out onto the streets uh and just you know randomly wave the people and do walk spots like ask them what's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of India and it was a very interesting exercise I repeated it over several years and you know there would be um some negative uh opinions like uh oh it's a very poor country or you know oh there's too many people you should have the one child policy uh but more than that usually people would talk about Buddhism as a major connector you know there was this idea that India is still up with this country and people would say fojia and sort of Bend and respect you know sort of Namaste like a hand gesture um there was also very much uh the the sense at that time that India was beginning to rise as a Global Soft power country and I would hear a lot of people saying that you know China is very good in a hardware India should be very good in software uh you know we can sort of come together and we can be a formidable chindia it was very rare to hear people talking about the Border dispute at the time uh it was very much something that was not up front and center at least in Chinese people's minds at all they were of course the victor of the 1962 it was not something that was drummed up with any great regularity unlike say for example uh diplomatic problems and Border problems such had with Japan which was something that was very regularly on the news India's border problems with China at the time had very much taken a back seat and this is something that has majorly changed I would say in the decades since yeah so I was just saying I was agreeing with her and saying that in the last five years it's the scenario that has changed massively but prior to that if you would try if you're traveling to you know uh places like Beijing or Shanghai and if if you are having a conversation there so people would definitely talk to you about say the movies Aamir Khan movies the Bollywood or the Indian Cuisine so that there was there was definitely a positive perception as well there but I think which has massively changed in the last few years you've talked about Bollywood um Cuisine and pallavi also mentioned India AS Global Soft power now Hema since you've done your research on comparative studies about India and China soft power specifically in Africa I'd like to know not academically but for common people to understand what does soft power exactly mean and how does it affect them the soft power would be something that flows very naturally very organically from a country's attraction what is it that why is it that country is so attractive to the general population of say some other region or place so uh uh going Beyond even the definition of what exactly Joseph and I would Define it to be or any other scholar would Define it to be it's just the country's attractiveness and how do you measure that country's attractiveness in what terms and what kind of indicators so I haven't seen that in that regard you know is India playing a good soft power game would you say in in your research looking at you know its role in Africa and competing with China on that regard um what is the South the soft power play that India has so when we talk has been with um China so I look at softball and I look at the role of the state that played a state plays when we talk about soccer and I differentiate software from terms like public diplomacy or propaganda so say you know the Hollywood of the United States or the educational Institutes of United States that have a massive attraction all over the world so uh that is something that needs to be counted upon when we look at software even in countries like China or India so when we look at the soft power of China we need to see what is the role of the state that is being laid out the massive amount of resources that the state invests in building a certain kind of image and when we look at India we'll have to see what is the role of the state then you know in building those public diplomacy images or how is the soft part then playing out you know vis-a-vis the public diplomacy and the propagandist mechanisms jumping and agree very much with what Hema has said in that soft power is something that is really Bottoms Up rather than something that is directed by government so when we say what is India's play when it comes to soft power I don't think I think that kind of like defeats the whole purpose of what soft power is where which is not something that is directed necessarily by policy in the case of china for example we've seen that they've set up over the last two decades Confucius institutes all over in a bid to you know increase their soft power but in fact those Confucius institutes have often ended up being seen uh as with suspicion and it is a propaganda rather than something that have increased China's power so I mean I have always thought that India has been uh uh a very power player both in the world and I think it was even possible to see it as being a big soft power player in China at least at the time that I was there and that was a kind of interesting asymmetry because China did not have that kind of soft power in India but I think India did in China again I'm talking about a decade ago whether we would uh Hima had mentioned but long before Aamir Khan movies in the 1960s you know the only uh uh uh foreign films that were officially allowed to be shown in China were the Socialist theme heavy Indian movies from the Raja era uh like avara and you would have people of a certain demographic in Beijing who would burst out singing the songs from that from that era even in the 2000s their idea of Indian women was that they were very beautiful that they had very large eyes um they they were interested in the food so you know there was generally a sense of being attracted to the country even though this was a poor country even though this was not a country that had the kind of hard power that somewhere like the US might have but religion as well the fact that Buddhism had come from India to China and had had such an important civilizational influence was something that Chinese people were very conscious of so when we looked at the sort of India China Dynamic there were asymmetries everywhere and in most ways China was uh had the advantage it was a much richer country it had much better infrastructure it had a better ability to project our abroad um in economic terms but I do think that when it came to soft power it was Advantage India where generally India was seen positively not only in China at that time but also globally so you said was you're speaking in the past tense it's you're describing a situation that India actually got off to a good start so to speak in terms of in terms of you know influencing perceptions what in your view has changed the Border dispute I mean essentially the during the decade that I was in China the Border dispute had not been resolved but it had been put on the back burner both governments had decided to move ahead on other areas like economic uh development trade and so on and leave in some ways the Border dispute federations to sort out um that does not seem to have happened and from an eight onwards we have seen regular flare-ups and you know result in um loss of lives and shots being fired things have not happened for for decades on the border and we've also seen the rise of two leaders across the border both of whom are very nationalists and populist uh I think that has also ratcheted up uh the rhetoric uh which has not had the case okay how do you think uh soft power the perceptions have changed under Modi and Xi Jinping um our perceptions would have so we do see a lot of um you know on social media especially in China about Modi and there are specific terms also that netizens and China referred to uh while they you know refer to Modi and the specific terms that they use for him so there is a lot of curiosity around him and I think that is one of uh the points that you know that can be highlighted when we look at the software that is being generated by in his leadership with him coming to power what kind of terms do you mean I think that is being used uh by the Chinese netizens for him I am not sure if I'll be I'm I remember it correctly um and I think under President Xi Jinping um Chinese India doesn't you know uh I don't think there has been a much um change I mean Indians have do there's a certain section of Indians who do you know China as authoritarian as an aggressive country while there is a population that is more interested in the economics of it you know Market or seeking so um I wouldn't really say that software perceptions changed greatly but there are there is some some impact and China's been known for having a aggressive foreign policy and now Indian foreign policy also seems to be going in that direction you see the tone that the foreign minister takes uh he said in very clear words uh that the relationship between India and China they are not normal and if I may quote that they cannot be normal if peace and Tranquility on Border areas are Disturbed so how do you see this like in which direction is this going yeah this is like a new normal in the china-india relationship that you know we are back to the square one we are back to resolving the looking at reporter disputes again where all the framework that was being looked at the cbn's the confidence building measures or the special representative program that has all broken down now and you know that classic understanding that existed about the Border disputes where that was you know put on the back burner and other issues related to economics or culture or tourism or technological everything was going ahead but now that you know that asset understanding has broken um it has triggered the security sensitivities of each other so we are back to square one I think and you know that has a spillover effect on everything else right India has banned the Chinese apps where India has you know not going ahead with a lot of contracts with Chinese technological companies infrastructure companies um so this is going to have an effect on other on all other spheres so that decoupling the forced decoupling is happening between the Chinese and Indian economic size as well then right pallavi wanted to say something I mean I think the huge difference that we're seeing uh over the this Millennium is the rise of China and you know where China was globally uh uh affected the bilateral relationship in 2005 and it affects the bilateral relationship in 2023 um it has become the second largest economy in the world um it has the U.S on the back foot and as a result I mean uh strategically China has become this great Obsession for all the big powers in the world and then India has a role to pay because it is seen as a very useful hedge against China's rise so I mean part of the the the the the change in the bilateral relationship between um Indiana also has to do with the change um globally uh with uh Western countries more and more trying to draw India into their Ambit as we have seen with the development of the Quad uh in the indo-pacific and uh and and we've seen uh India sort of also wanting to embrace raise that role which aggravated China in many ways and uh as a result has impacted the bilateral relationship substantially embrace you say but not always I mean when it comes to the war in Ukraine for example the United States would like to see much better more and deeper Indian support uh and and and and more distance with its you know long-term especially military relations with Russia so I'm curious you say that India wants to embrace this uh sort of hedge a western hedge against China maybe you can detail a little bit more because because I I could I see both you know both aspects yes what India wants of course is strategic autonomy right it wants to be able to have its cake and eat it too in many ways that's what most countries around the world want and powerful countries have had a history of being able to do that whether you look at the U.S China now feels that they are in a position that they have risen to the point where they can assert their Authority in that way which is why I also they ended up becoming much more aggressive on the border with India post 2008 because they made a assessment of their comprehensive National Power and they arrived at the conclusion that now they were strong enough to actually start asserting their national interests abroad right I'm curious you know the you the United States and the European Union are trying to figure out how to characterize China and their relationship with China competitor systemic rival these kinds of terms get thrown around a lot and it's it's sort of everything um I'm curious maybe you can you can talk more about this how do China and India see each other are they Rivals are they collaborators are they leaders of the global South what is the relationship how do these two sides see each other so um Chinese leaders have repeatedly mentioned that you know Asia is a large space that can accommodate interests of both the powers um China as well as India and you know we don't we did not see we do not need to see this competition really essentially as the zero-sum game uh but you know looking at you know how these both Asian powers are seeking hegemony in this space they are that there is there is going to be some sort of rivalry and competition but I think we need to um we do not need to see this relationship in terms of strict binaries you know competition conflict or cooperation um so I think there is there is uh there is a need to look at this relationship beyond the binaries the strict binaries of competition and conflict and see this relationship as a multicassisted uh engagement you know and look at different uh percent of these engagement to the Border disputes and maybe the military part of it and then the economic or cultural part of it is a different kind of and then assess you know how do they view each other in that um aspect so we know about the Border dispute I'm maybe you can give us some examples about you know where do we see this where would you know normal people in the world see collaboration see competition uh see rivalry where where does that kind of come up especially I would imagine economically I was just giving an example from Africa so when there are oil deals we do see competition between Chinese and Indian state-owned Enterprises buying foreign exploration deals but there have also been instances where they both have collaborated and um you know in certain deals uh in an African countries like Sudan so there have been examples of both competition and collaboration and I think there can be collaboration even on you know say issues like climate change um so that there would definitely be some areas where they can collaborate uh but competition or you know some sort of antagonism is found to exist also in that space yeah I mean I think when it comes to competition it's quite clear it's on two fronts political and economic um politically you know India has traditionally seen a lot of the neighboring countries um uh as sort of being in its Ambit right South Asian countries Sri Lanka Bangladesh it has its problems with Pakistan and Myanmar and we have seen steady uh um uh well I don't know what the right word is of influence perhaps of Chinese in um all of these uh countries um developing ports for example that is known as The String of Pearls strategies of China kind of encircling India with a string of pearls in all of these countries and India has traditionally seen in its own Amber giving them loans helping to build infrastructure um and essentially uh being a kind of alternative uh Power to India India has long kind of played Big Brother in many of these nations and has some patches sometimes evoked resentment in these nations and that resentment is something that China has actually taken advantage of and sort of moved in there's a little competition um uh for uh you know who's who has actual strategic power in these countries between the two economically while the two have both developed their bilateral trade it's very uneven bilateral trade with huge um deficit um uh in favor of China um and India has uh Ambitions to becoming a manufacturing superpowers I think that Trinity has been and would in many ways like to take over some of the manufacturing that is moving out of China as a political hedge but has so far not been uh successful in that um as far as areas of collaboration are concerned I think one major area of collaboration that we had seen develop over the years was in education with tens and thousands of Indians flocking to China particularly to many medical colleges to study over there but again because of the pandemic and the restrictions we're seeing a dialing back of that uh one area where uh collaboration really was flourishing when it comes to things like climate change there's been a lot of talk about that over the last 20 years as there has been talk about Hardware software collaboration but we haven't actually seen this coming to uh fruition unfortunately the the Strategic and political competition only seems to be heating up and it has something to do with the particular political leaders that the two countries have at the moment as well and when you talk of competition do you see any competition in the media landscape as well now there's a later survey that shows that 43 percent of Indians believe that China is Enemy Number One so Pakistan is no more the biggest danger it's China and the main reason behind that is the way Indian media portrays China how are things in China how is India portrait there in media I mean again the the problem that we are seeing is that we do not have on the ground journalists so when we are talking about betrayal what is this media portrayal I mean this these are people that are essentially not you might have somebody from Delhi who's not moving out of their desk who's calling the same old sources usually in the military militaries have their own vested interests in terms of you know pottering relations in a very particular way I on the other hand when I was in China would write about a whole range of stories as would other foreign correspondents who are on the ground so I'll just give you a couple of examples about why it is important to have uh journalists on the ground covering it because it humanizes the country it holds a mirror up to your own country it helps you to understand what impact are the commonalities the commonalities are not just there in education or in policy the commonalities are there in society before I moved to China I thought this was going to be an incredibly inscrutable country instead I found a reflection in India in so many ways in the manner in which strangers address each other for example in both India and in China which other Mr or Miss we call each other Auntie Uncle grandmother a manner in which uh you know recycling vendors would cycle around the old city you know neighborhoods buying up cardboard boxes in order to recycle and pay a little bit of money to the person who was selling them in the manner in which people on buses would share their oranges and their boiled eggs with somebody sitting next to them even if they did not know them in the manner in which you have these Urban villages in the midst of even the biggest city cities that were there and all of these stories I think really helped to humanize one country to the other these are the most important stories because ultimately you realize that you know when it comes to borders what is a border these are man-made uh things that have been drawn on the map but they do not really affect the day-to-day life of people and I firmly believe that most common people in both countries do not want kind of war and destruction on each other what we end up having are the fourth multipliers of a small number of trolls on uh social media which then end up driving this very nationalistic hysterical agenda and a kind of tit-for-tat mentality uh which ends up in the zero-sum game that we are currently facing and and what about critical reporting perloo we know India has said that the foreign correspondence in China they were having to face some problems and they could not hire local stringers Etc how is it when you you were there I had absolutely no problems I had a local Stringer and I also spoke Chinese so it had because a lot of the Indians who are there don't speak Chinese and hence they are dependent more on Stringer so I was able to actually just interview anybody on the on the road and I found people extremely open and willing to talk unlike the kind of perception that there is in India of the Chinese being controlled robots by authoritarian dictators who dare not say anything unless they get into trouble the people who did not want to talk were government officials anybody who had anything to do with the party but if you just kind of went down again to the set of people to people contact level uh Chinese people will stay open especially if you spoke the language I also happened to speak to my uh successor um with the Hindu newspaper in China whose Visa was suspended in April of this year and I I put to him this question about how it had been this last year and he said that he had not confronted any difficulties particularly in reporting that the Chinese side had been as open as they are I mean there are restrictions you need permissions for example to be able to report in Tibet you need a permission to be able to report in xinjiang um uh uh you know you know like I said when you are trying to actually contact government officials it can often be very difficult and if you do manage to secure interviews you'd unlikely to get anything that stays from the official line so there are all of those restrictions but they're not as Draconian I think as they have been made out to be in um by the Indian government and in sections of the Indian media and by speaking to the last Indian the Indian journalist who was actually on the ground until April this year from what I could make out they did not have any problems hiring stringers and they had been no new restrictions that had been placed and that would have caused the Indian government to start engaging in some kind of expulsions journalists as revenge or in a kind of tit-for-tac move hey Matt so we're hearing from palawi the you know both the potential and the great reward in having people-to-people contact having people on the ground to really experience and share their stories but at the same time this zero-sum game that things are getting worse I'm wondering from your research and your expertise is there a way out of this because social media is not going away the trolls are not going away this nationalistic anger is not going away do you see in your research uh solutions for sort of walking back from these tensions yeah so I do agree with pallavi that the human element is extremely important you know and to have journalists on the ground and that is what brings the human aspect the human story aspect to it and I mean I can completely say this because when I was doing my PhD it was only pallavi's book that you know was there which would tell the stories of all the ground what's happening and in China and you know stories that would make a scholar or a researcher relate to the place that they are studying about so that's that's extremely important um solutions to the current scenario right now is Bleak I mean because since uh I mean to speak less of rhetoric and more of what the reality speaks about is uh the entire structure is broken down and to put that back in place would require a lot of efforts from the policy Elites first and um that took and that process of this engagement is going to be very slow because both the countries have a varying um an extreme uh you know perspective to how they want to resolve the dispute right now so it's going to be a slow process I think it's going to be a painful process from both the sides of how they resolve I mean not entirely resolving the Border dispute but have some kind of facet understanding on how they want to put that on the side and then move ahead and further on different issues but to come back to what pallavi was same you know earlier about reporting I mean I mean I mean I would just like to understand you know right president Xi Jinping coming in and you know I've heard that you know very popularly from other journalists that reporting style had changed and you know how it was not easier to have reporting from the ground so I mean do you see some change with him coming in power or was it still the same limit the general perception remained that you know things have changed with him certainly things have changed with him and that they've taken on a much more nationalistic tone and the Chinese media which had been showing some signs of liberalizing um in the hu jintawan era uh became completely clamped down so we saw uh any of that opening that had started to happen for example Chinese journalists that began to report a little bit more openly on environmental issues a little bit more openly on health a little bit more openly on um economic issues um that room essentially disappeared and so when it comes to Chinese journalists themselves reporting on China the room had narrowed um the room had narrowed very much on what were the permissible topics that you could uh discuss uh you know every every day there is a kind of edit meeting in Chinese media rooms where people are told what are the things that you can get up and those number of topics were increasing there was certainly no ability to have any kind of descent or criticism of the top leadership themselves so what we would be seeing about Chinese media reporting on China had changed very much and I assumed that there was also a knock-on effect on Chinese foreign correspondence and what were the subjects that they were reporting on from other countries however in terms of the effect on foreign correspondence from other countries based in China from what I've heard um uh you know I mean there weren't any greater um there wasn't a greater squeeze on them there was a problem with American journalists there was a problem with Australian journalists and we've seen them also being expelled and essentially being used in many ways in a kind of policy tit-for-tat um scenario but apart from these two countries and now India um the rest of the foreign journalists over there were continuing to report we're continuing to be able to visit companies we're continuing to be able to travel or continue to be able to see whoever would talk to them talk to them and then write about it in their own newspapers or media over which the Chinese government are predicted control what do you think will happen in September when G20 Summit takes place will there be dialogue between both the sides will there be enough reporting from both the sides today will be dialogue um uh one hopes uh at this stage given how tense of relations are it is difficult to predict um the point is is that dialogue that actually moves the needle forward or not and I don't think that we are in a position right now where we are going to see any major or breakthrough so the best that we can hope for is that you know they continue talking there isn't a breakdown but I don't think that we're going to expect a breakthrough and as far as reporting is concerned I think we're just going to see more ad hoc reporting from what I know the Chinese government now invites quite a few Indian journalists over to China on uh like short Fellowship programs for six months or nine months and please for them to go around reporting on China but we must remember that this is very much part of their propaganda efforts it's paid for by the Chinese government they are taken specifically to report on certain issues the interviews are controlled in fixed up and invariably these are journalists speak the language language and therefore unable to sort of break out on their own in any case so we will continue to see reporting but I think we're going to see a much more kind of controlled reporting and I also fear that we're going to be seeing it on the Indian side um our Indian government is a no great fan of free media either and does not seem to be particularly concerned that there is going to be no on the ground reporting in terms of Indian journalists in um China they have not offered any help they have they have continued to expel the Chinese journalists so that you know for that measure the Indian journalists in turn are expelled I don't think that it does not suit the Modi government's agenda either to not have free these are both governments that want to control uh uh the media and not having independent journalists on the ground feeds into that Hema coming back to the soft power question we're coming towards the end of the show who do you think is winning the soft power game do you think India can match up the Chinese game I think softball is not a zero-sum game I think both can win and both can lose at the same time uh but if I speak of Africa um I think India has an upper hand there because India has deep rooted historical connections India has a large presence of diaspora which has been there for a very long time um connections cultural connections you know there has been a familiarity some Affinity cultural and language affinities that exist there so India has an upper hand there while China it seems to be the state which is pushing through um you know a certain agenda on the continent but not to say that China does not have absolutely any software Chinese software does come massively from its infrastructure projects which Garner a lot of visibility and attention on the continent so to say that you know one is losing and the other is not and I think that would not be correct I think both can win and both can lose at the same thank you Hema thank you pallavi both of you for your time thank you thank you very much it was lovely talking to both of you and to you thank you that was joining us from Madrid in Spain and Hema narang joining us from Delhi in India and they both gave us a lot to think about in terms of Indian China relations the world's two largest countries with very little to say to each other right now which is kind of a scary Prospect very little to say to each other and very little that journalists can now say about India and China because they're not going to be any like pallavi said there's the last man standing and the people-to-people contact that's going to be really zero probably and how that impacts the soft power that we're talking about that is not necessarily as we heard a zero-sum game that one country's winning the soft power game on countries losing they can both win they can both lose but it seems like if there isn't that human to human contact we're all going to lose and they're going to be perceptions which are changing which change with social media with change with the way things are reported but now that there would be no reporting let's see what perceptions are going to be like what do you think do let us know what are your perceptions about India and China and what do you think who is winning the soft power game if any of them is winning we'll be reading your comments this is Isha Bhatia I'm Wayne bluecraft signing off go back a new take on security policy by DW

Channel: DW News

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Keywords: DW News, global eyes india china, security policy, china-india relations, belt and road, india china, modi china, china india

Id: dlttrx00WSs

Length: 40min 29sec (2429 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023