South Asia and Beyond

BRI Comes With Subtle But Powerful Baggage Of Discourse: Australian Academic Clive Hamilton

 BRI Comes With Subtle But Powerful Baggage Of Discourse: Australian  Academic Clive Hamilton

NEW DELHI: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature project—The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—is disconcerting for many countries. It is projected as a means for other countries to benefit from China’s capital and infrastructure-building capacity but in China it is seen as a grand project that will help assert China’s strategic influence around the world, says Australian academic and author Clive Hamilton. Speaking to StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale, he added: “It’s really about shaping the way people think about China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)”. Hamilton also dwells upon the ‘enormous importance the CCP puts on the battle of ideas’. So, it tries to win over think tanks, intellectuals and the media in other countries, including in India where it has targeted ‘elites’.

Nitin A Gokhale WhatsApp Channel

Nitin A. Gokhale

Left to himself, Nitin A. Gokhale would rather watch films and sports matches but his day job as a media entrepreneur, communications specialist, analyst and author, leaves him little time to indulge in his primary interests. Gokhale in fact started his career in journalism in 1983 as a sports reporter. Since then he has, in the past 41 years, traversed the entire spectrum across print, broadcast and digital space. One of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Gokhale has moved on from conventional media to become an independent media entrepreneur running three niche digital platforms—BharatShakti, StratNewsGlobal and Interstellar—besides undertaking consultancy and training workshops in communications for military institutions, corporates and individuals. Now better known for his conflict coverage and strategic analyses, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years between 1983 and 2006, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 and also brought us live coverage from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009.    An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, Australia, South and South-East Asia to take part in various seminars and conferences. Gokhale is also a popular visiting faculty at India’s Defence Services Staff College, the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the IB’s intelligence school.

Related