If China thought it had effectively marginalised the Dalai Lama in recent years, it is being forced to think again. In the last few months, the Dalai Lama has once again shot back to international prominence. While the US has given him the highest civilian honour, the Congressional Gold Medal, a number of western leaders have met him this year. Pope Benedict is now slated to meet the Dalai Lama at the Vatican next month.

As Beijing prepares to host the Olympics next summer, China is surely concerned that the Tibet question might be leveraged by western countries. Tibetan activists around the world are already pressing for an international boycott of the Olympics. Unconfirmed reports that Chinese border guards had shot at a group of Tibetans fleeing into Nepal last month and that there have been some bold protests by Buddhist monks in Tibet in recent weeks, bode ill for the Beijing Olympics.

Hu’s missiles

While the Indian nuclear debate is all talk and no action, the Chinese leaders nurture their high technology programmes against all odds. During Mao’s cultural revolution of the 1960s, China’s first Prime Minister Zhou Enlai went to great lengths to protect the nuclear and space programmes from the political upheavals of the time.

For Deng Xiaoping, military modernisation was as important as the economic transformation of China. Following this tradition, Chinese President Hu Jintao found time on Sunday to spend with the 2nd Artillery Corps which mans Beijing’s strategic missile arsenal.

Hu’s emphasis on a rapid upgradation of Chinese missile forces came as Beijing was hosting a visit by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates. Announcing a new hotline between the Chinese and American military establishments, Beijing has underlined its arrival as an atomic superpower.

New silk roads

As a xenophobic Indian political class rails against the international system, China leverages global institutions for its own ends. Take the Asian Development Bank. For decades, India has blocked the ADB from funding road projects in the subcontinent. As a consequence, India’s connectivity with its natural hinterlands has steadily dissipated.

China, in contrast, gets the ADB to finance better road links with its neighbours and help penetrate their markets. After effective exploitation of international funding for trans-national infrastructure in Southeast Asia, Beijing is now turning to Central Asia. Last week at a conference in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, China mobilised international finance for an initiative to build new trans-national highways in Central Asia at a cost of nearly US $19 billion.

Attending the conference were ministers from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Representatives of the ADB and five other multilateral institutions also joined in.

On his way to Central Asia, ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda had passed through New Delhi. There was much talk about infrastructure, but no new project announcements.

The writer is professor at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore