India to resume issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens
HONG KONG (Reuters) -- India will resume issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens from July 24 this year, its embassy in China said on Wednesday, the first time in five years as both countries move to repair their rocky relationship.
Tensions between the two countries escalated following a 2020 military clash along their disputed Himalayan border.
In response, India imposed restrictions on Chinese investments, banned hundreds of popular Chinese apps and cut passenger routes.
China suspended visas to Indian citizens and other foreigners around the same time due to the COVID-19 pandemic but lifted those restrictions in 2022, when it resumed issuing visas for students and business travelers.
Tourist visas for Indian nationals remained restricted until March this year, when both countries agreed to resume direct air service.
Relations have gradually improved, with several high-level meetings taking place last year, including talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Russia in October.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Wednesday that Beijing had noted the positive move.
"China is ready to maintain communication and consultation with India and constantly improve the level of personal exchanges between the two countries," he said.
India and China share a 3,800 km (2,400-mile) border that has been disputed since the 1950s. The two countries fought a brief but brutal border war in 1962 and negotiations to settle the dispute have made slow progress.
In July, India's foreign minister told his Chinese counterpart that both countries must resolve border friction, pull back troops and avoid "restrictive trade measures" to normalize their relationship.
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The Diplomat
an hour ago
- The Diplomat
China's Progress Toward Military Supremacy
The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Joel Wuthnow ̶ senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs within the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University (NDU) and co-author with Philip C. Saunders of 'China's Quest for Military Supremacy' (Polity 2025) – is the 471st in 'The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.' This interview represents only Wuthnow's views and not those of NDU or the Department of Defense. Explain this statement in your book: China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) 'has become a global actor, but it is not yet a global power.' The PLA has become more actively involved beyond China's immediate periphery, but usually in very modest ways. Examples include counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, participation in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Africa and the Middle East, and a single overseas base in Djibouti. These are all non-combat-focused missions that involve no more than a few thousand troops. There are also strong constraints on the PLA's ability to deploy larger contingents abroad, including the lack of a global command structure and limited global logistics infrastructure. This means that while the PLA can project influence and shape the security environment, it cannot conduct the same range of combat missions that the U.S. military can based on our forward presence of hundreds of thousands of troops in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. China has avoided a larger commitment because it has opted to focus on priorities closer to home, and because it tries not to get too enmeshed in foreign conflicts. Examine the PLA's concept of 'strategic discipline.' China has a military strategy that requires the PLA to be most ready for domestic emergencies and conflicts with neighbors, with a focus on Taiwan. Starting from a low level of modernization decades ago, they have pragmatically followed this strategy over successive administrations – favoring long-term acquisition and piece-by-piece military reforms over global deployments that would have overstretched their capabilities, and near-term escalations that would have complicated their force buildup. Even in Asia, they have kept conflicts at a low level, usually favoring 'gray zone' tactics over outright use of force. Exercising strategic patience has resulted in a military that is far more advanced than it would have been had they been distracted. But it also came at the price of real-world experience since they have avoided becoming involved in full-blown armed conflicts since the 1980s. 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Beijing might seek to use that influence to restrict the U.S. military's ability to deploy and sustain forces in a future conflict and reduce our ability to pull together a coalition. How might the PLA exercise military supremacy in a plausible Taiwan Strait conflict? China has regarded a cross-strait conflict as its main planning scenario since the early 1990s. The immediate goal is leveraging military power to deter Taiwan independence, but the PLA also needs to be able to use force to compel reunification. Xi has given them a deadline of 2027 to be ready. They have several options on the table, including different kinds of blockades, operations against Taiwan's offshore islands, and even a full-scale invasion. They are actively training for and rehearsing these kinds of operations. They are also thinking through the complications of those operations and trying to find solutions to them. 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They are also increasingly worried about Washington strengthening its allies, which Beijing fears is encouraging states such as Japan and the Philippines to press more firmly in their territorial disputes with China. In addition, U.S. export control restrictions under the last couple administrations are making it harder for China to acquire technology necessary for its military modernization, such as advanced semiconductors. Operationally, there are growing risks of collisions at sea and in the air, and growing concerns about escalation in the space and cyber realms, and about dangers in the nuclear domain as China rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal. Leaders on both sides are considering what they need to do to prevent crises and effectively manage them if they occur.
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2 hours ago
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Erasing Confucian Cosmology: How Harmony Lost Its Soul
The statue at Fan Zhongyan's tomb site in Yichuan County, Henan. In 1043, Fan's Ten-Point Memorial proposed civil, military, and educational reforms not simply as policy corrections, but as acts of cosmological repair. Confucian cosmology once bound rulers to an order they could not command, linking virtue, ritual, and the rhythms of Heaven. This second essay in the Simulated Sagehood series explores how that moral architecture has been emptied and re-coded in China. In place of resonance, Xi's regime installs synchronization; in place of harmony across difference, it imposes order through uniformity. What remains is not metaphysics, but choreography, an aesthetics of control masquerading as ethical order. Under Xi Jinping, the metaphysical heart of Confucianism – once pulsing with the idea of cosmic responsiveness (ganying, 感应) – remains in name but is empty in spirit. The words of the tradition still echo in speeches and textbooks, but their deeper logic – where human action was supposed to resonate with a morally ordered universe – has been stripped of its ethical charge and repurposed for political submission. In classical Chinese thought, cosmology wasn't abstract speculation. It was a moral architecture, a way of binding rulers to a higher standard. Tian (Heaven) wasn't a deity, but a moral horizon – a principle rulers had to align with. Ganying wasn't just intuition; it was a ritual circuit, a choreography of offerings, timing, and space that linked governance to cosmic rhythms. Power was judged not by loyalty or efficiency, but by how well it harmonized with this larger moral field. He (和), often translated as 'harmony,' didn't mean peace or consensus. It meant ethical balance – a live calibration between Heaven, ruler, minister, and people. In the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), zhong (中) refers to centrality or equilibrium – not as a fixed state, but as a form of ethical responsiveness. Virtue created legitimacy, but only if it answered to something outside itself. This notion of 'differentiated harmony' – captured by the phrase he er bu tong (和而不同), or 'harmony without uniformity' – stood in quiet opposition to the Legalist idea of yi (一), or enforced sameness. Where Confucians aimed for resonance across difference, Legalists imposed order by crushing it. That contrast would come roaring back under the Chinese Communist Party's modern appropriation of Confucian ideas. Imperial China took this moral cosmology seriously. Omens, droughts, and celestial events were read as signs of moral imbalance, demanding ritual correction. In 637, Emperor Taizong issued a limited ban on animal slaughter during the three annual changzhai (long fasts) – not a sweeping reform, but a gesture toward ethical recalibration, where Confucian ren (benevolence) met Buddhist compassion in an act of cosmic repair. A few centuries later, Song Dynasty Emperor Zhenzong responded to strange heavenly phenomena by unveiling a 'Heavenly Text' (tianshu) – a supposed divine revelation that was in fact fabricated by the Daoist priest Zhao Yu. What followed wasn't retreat, but theatrical escalation: grand new rites, altar constructions, and sacrifices, especially at Mount Tai. These weren't acts of superstition, but were scripted performances designed to restore Heaven–ruler resonance. Even the Western Zhou Dynasty, nearly 3,000 years ago, eclipses could trigger pauses in labor conscription or suspensions of punishment. The message was clear: power must remain morally permeable to the world beyond itself. There were moments – rare but real – when Confucian cosmology exerted genuine moral traction on political authority. The Western Han Emperors Wen and Jing, ruling in the aftermath of the Qin collapse, pursued a politics of restraint. Collective punishment was scaled back (though retained in treason cases), fiscal discipline enforced, and rituals simplified. Wen, in particular, refused to build new palaces and avoided lavish rites, not merely out of thrift but as a gesture of symbolic restraint that later Confucian historians would interpret as alignment with Heaven. While the dominant ideology of the court remained Huang-Lao – a syncretic blend of Daoist non-action and Legalist statecraft – advisers like Lu Jia began articulating a political ethic grounded in virtue and moral suasion rather than coercion. His Xinyu rejected Qin authoritarianism and emphasized humane governance, ritual propriety, and the ruler's ethical conduct as the foundation of lasting order. Although not yet grounded in the metaphysics of resonance, this early Han rhetoric laid conceptual foundations for later cosmological models of rulership, where austerity could function as a ritualized performance of moral clarity. Centuries later, under the Northern Song, Emperor Renzong presided over one of the clearest efforts to embed Confucian ethics into the structures of governance. Reformers like Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu interpreted institutional decay as a symptom of moral misalignment. In 1043, Fan's Ten-Point Memorial proposed civil, military, and educational reforms not simply as policy corrections, but as acts of cosmological repair. Renzong responded to droughts and disasters with a pattern of ritualized self-accountability – issuing scores of self-reproach edicts, palace diet reductions, and public requests for remonstrance. While the precise number is debated, it far exceeded that of any earlier Song monarch. These gestures were not mere formalities: they often accompanied dismissals, budget reallocations, and real administrative shifts. They did not transform the system. But they did mark moments when sovereignty acknowledged its limits and sought legitimacy by answering to a moral order beyond itself. Yet those flashes of traction were neither continuous nor permanent. Over time, ritual began to detach from moral substance and serve the consolidation of power. Confucian forms were retained, but their ethical force dulled. Ming Emperor Yongle built the sprawling Temple of Heaven between 1406 and 1420 – not just as a sacred site, but as a theatrical assertion of harmony. The architecture multiplied altars and axis lines in a performance of cosmic alignment, even as Yongle centralized power and suppressed dissent. Qing emperors performed elaborate rituals at the empire's frontiers even while expanding through conquest and destruction – most infamously during the Dzungar genocide and the incorporation of Tibet and Xinjiang. Harmony remained on the stage, but it no longer bound sovereignty to an ethical horizon. Ritual could now operate as a mirror or a mask. Under Xi, the entire cosmological structure hasn't been debated or disproved – it's simply been overwritten. In 2013, the directive On Cultivating and Practicing the Core Socialist Values recast he (harmony) as 'unity and cohesion under Party leadership.' That may sound cosmetic, but it marks a profound ontological shift. Where he once meant ethical balance between distinct entities – ruler and Heaven, humans and nature – it now means the elimination of difference. In this, Xi's reinterpretation hews closer to the Legalist ideal of yi – sameness as control – than to Confucian harmony. The 2021 Xi Jinping Thought Student Readers illustrate this clearly. Children learn about 'social harmony' through standardized dress, synchronized flag-raisings, and orderly public behavior. He is illustrated by clean streets, neat queues, and families watching the evening news in unison. What once expressed resonance across moral and cosmic domains is now reduced to aesthetic compliance. It's not a misreading of Confucianism – it's an inversion. The classical system nurtured harmony by balancing difference; Xi's model engineers harmony by erasing it. This logic extends beyond human society. In Mencius 1A7, a ruler's refusal to watch an ox suffer was more than kindness – it was an ethical sensitivity that reached beyond class, species, and utility. That single passage fueled debates on humane governance for centuries. Han thinker Dong Zhongshu warned that Heaven sent disasters when animals were slaughtered without ritual care. His Chunqiu Fanlu linked environmental order, moral virtue, and the ethics of sacrificial violence into a single system. The Book of Rites urged nobles to abstain from meat while mourning – not just for human grief, but in recognition of broader sentient suffering. That whole ethical universe is now dormant. Modern CCP documents and textbooks no longer mention tian-ren ganying – the resonance between Heaven and humanity. Environmental policy is framed not as stewardship but as technocratic optimization. The flagship initiative of 'ecological civilization,' introduced under Hu Jintao and expanded by Xi, turns environmental ethics into spreadsheets: carbon credits, eco-city blueprints, green GDP. The moral grammar remains, but it's been converted into metrics. Nowhere is this clearer than in Xiong'an, the showcase 'smart eco-city.' Citizens are encouraged to embrace 'green lifestyles,' rewarded with housing and benefits for actions like tree-planting or sorting trash. AI-based behavioral scoring is still uneven, but the logic is already in place: ethical performance as data. Even phrases like tian-ren he-yi (Heaven and humanity in unity) survive – but only as marketing for Chinese diplomacy or tech-savvy modernization. The cosmos is still cited. But it's no longer inhabited. This transformation didn't begin with Xi. Mao Zedong denounced Heaven as superstition and collapsed moral order into class struggle. Deng Xiaoping shifted legitimacy from cosmic alignment to GDP growth. Hu Jintao tried to soften that edge, introducing slogans like 'harmonious society' and 'ecological civilization.' Xi finishes the arc – not by discarding the old language, but by embalming it. Harmony becomes discipline. Virtue becomes loyalty. Heaven becomes a decorative backdrop. To many outside China, this might look like rational progress. After all, in a world run by data and governance metrics, who needs omens or rites? But Confucian cosmology was never about superstition. Its real power lay in de-centering authority – binding it to something it couldn't control. Floods and eclipses mattered not because they caused political change, but because they interpreted power. That external frame – where sovereignty had to respond to something beyond itself – acted as a brake on autocracy. Consider the late Ming. When the Wanli emperor stopped performing the Temple of Heaven rites for nearly 30 years, Confucian officials protested not out of rote ritualism, but because his silence symbolized a breakdown in the moral order. His absence from ritual space became a proxy for dynastic decay, long before the Manchu threat arrived. Other civilizations have had cosmological checks – mizan (moral balance) in Islamic thought, logos in Stoicism, ordo in medieval Christianity – but none formalized them quite like China. The Chinese model triangulated Heaven, ruler, and people through codified rites, bureaucratized resonance, and symbolic accountability. That precision makes its unraveling today even more striking. In Xi's China, that triangle is broken. Tian no longer functions as a moral constraint. The people cannot remonstrate in meaningful ways. Legitimacy no longer flows from above or below – it loops inward. The 20th Party Congress made this official: the CCP's centralized leadership is now the sole source of political truth. Omens are out. Metrics are in. And in 2022, a revised Party Constitution placed Xi Jinping Thought above even Deng Xiaoping Theory. Authority no longer seeks external justification. It declares itself valid. Recovering the spirit of Confucian cosmology doesn't mean reviving superstition. It means recovering the principle of external constraint. Replace eclipses with transparency. Replace sacrificial rites with civic audits. Replace Heaven–Earth resonance with climate interdependence rooted in responsibility. What matters isn't mysticism; it's the refusal to let power justify itself on its own terms. What remains today is a highly curated imitation. Harmony is measured in spatial order. Virtue becomes a checkbox. Heaven becomes a logo on a brochure. The symbolism persists, but the force is gone. Ritual no longer binds power to morality – it seals it within performance. The CCP reenacts legitimacy on a stage drained of resonance. The architecture still stands, but the breath is gone.
The Diplomat
2 hours ago
- The Diplomat
China Now Dominates Open Source AI. How Much Does That Matter?
U.S. AI models still control over 70 percent of the market, but a collaborative, open source approach has enabled Chinese labs to punch far above their weight. U.S. AI models still control over 70 percent of the market, but a collaborative, open source approach has enabled Chinese labs to punch far above their weight. For the second time in six months, a small Chinese artificial intelligence lab has made major waves across the global landscape. Moonshot AI, with just a few hundred employees, recently released its K2 model to remarkable acclaim. On OpenRouter, a platform that tracks which AI models developers actually pay to use, K2 quickly surpassed offerings from well-funded U.S. competitors including xAI and Meta. This achievement mirrors the success of DeepSeek, another Chinese AI model that made headlines earlier this year. Both share a crucial characteristic: they are open source, meaning their underlying code and architecture are freely available for anyone to examine, modify, and build upon. Among big labs in the United States, only Meta has followed suit. But with the social media giant's latest model widely considered a flop, China is now the undisputed leader in open source AI development. To understand why this matters requires clarifying what 'open source' means in the context of AI. Open source AI models are free to download but, unlike most open source software, they come with significant operational expenses. When DeepSeek offered free access to consumers, many confused this promotional strategy with the inherent nature of open source models. In reality, all base models require significant computing power, whether it's paid for by the hosting company – as in the case of consumer products or APIs – or the user. For everyday consumers, the distinction between open-source and closed is invisible. Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT offer free basic access. Despite the enthusiasm around DeepSeek's launch, ChatGPT still commands six times as many users globally. The same ranking that showed Moonshot surpassing xAI and Meta has Anthropic and Google alone with majority market share. Nonetheless, K2 is remarkably efficient. The rates for programmatic access to the best version of the model are comparable to the rates for Google and OpenAI's cheapest models. That is not because K2 is open source, but is in large part thanks to efficiency gains made possible by China's open source AI culture. Moonshot drew heavily from DeepSeek's architecture, to the point that one engineer described K2 as 'fulfilling a prophecy that the DeepSeek team had already made.' This collaborative approach echoes the early days of U.S. AI development, when Google's publication of transformer architecture and release of tools like TensorFlow catalyzed the entire field. U.S. AI labs have since focused on proprietary models instead. Chinese offerings may become the default choice for researchers looking for models they can modify and customize, which could subtly shape how AI systems understand and interact with the world. Some research suggests Western models reflect Western worldviews, and Chinese models may well do the same. While enthusiasts quickly release 'uncensored' versions, like Perplexity's DeepSeek 1776, which speak freely on topics forbidden in China, more fundamental assumptions about society, relationships, and values may remain deeply embedded in the training. A growing community of programmers worldwide is now working to adapt and improve these Chinese models for specific uses, potentially accelerating their development. In the words of another Moonshot engineer, 'open-sourcing allows us to leverage the power of the developer community to improve the technical ecosystem. Within 24 hours of our release, the community had already implemented K2 in MLX, with 4-bit quantization [allowing a compressed version of the model to run on Apple devices] and more – things we truly don't have the manpower to accomplish ourselves at this stage.' But for now, open source models serve primarily specialized purposes: handling sensitive information that can't be sent to commercial services (which is unlikely to be entrusted to Chinese models anytime soon), or running AI on devices disconnected from the internet. Industry watchers expect Moonshot to soon release a 'reasoning' model designed to match the previous generation of U.S. AI systems. When that happens, we can expect another wave of concern about China's AI progress. Much of this anxiety will be overblown – U.S. models still control over 70 percent of the market on platforms like OpenRouter, and U.S. firms continue to push the boundaries of what's possible while Chinese labs focus on optimization and efficiency. Nevertheless, K2 represents a significant achievement, particularly given the constraints under which Chinese AI researchers operate. The collaborative, open source approach has enabled Chinese labs to punch far above their weight, just as the United States' strongest open source advocate, Meta, stumbles. Much is yet to be written: Meta has gone on a multibillion dollar spending spree to right their ship and OpenAI will release their own open source model in the coming weeks. But as more developers worldwide turn to Chinese models as their starting point, the long-term implications for global AI development – and the values embedded within these systems – deserve serious consideration.
