Look East (via Macau) - O Heraldo 26/10/2025
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V M
Nov 5, 2025, 6:27:28 AM (2 days ago) Nov 5
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https://www.heraldgoa.in/edit/look-east-via-macau/450681/
So much uncertainty in the world, but there can be no doubt about China’s ascent to the central role in contemporary geopolitics.
So much uncertainty in the world, but there can be no doubt about China’s ascent to the central role in contemporary geopolitics.
Here in Asia, it has long been understood this new world order would occur, but no one expected it to happen quite so fast. After all, as recently as 1991, when India embarked on its own consequential economic liberalization, the two countries had almost exactly the same per-capita GDP. Then China doubled ahead in just 10 years, and has kept on accelerating. Last year, its average crested past $13000 - compare to $2700 in India – and calculated by purchasing power parity (aka “real GDP”) it's clear the USA has been displaced as the largest economy, and apex global power.
All this past week, we have seen starker indications of this new reality. The prime minister of Singapore told Financial Times that “we are certainly in the midst of a great transition to a post-American order” and – after decades of skepticism - The Economist acknowledged “China is winning the trade war [and] changing the path of the world economy.” Meanwhile, the “America First” cohort has given up trying to counterbalance China in Asia, as seen in their shocking and disgraceful turn against India and Japan. Instead, the Trumpists are trying tactical retreat to the Americas and Atlantic sphere: fantasies about annexing Greenland, chest-beating on Canada as 51st state, and – considerably less farcically – menacing and (probably imminently) invading Venezuela.
“China’s ascent during the age of globalization [is] the single most dramatic development in world economic history, bar none,” wrote the Columbia University professor Adam Tooze, in his popular and often prescient Chartbook online newsletter some time ago, outlining “utterly radical economic development in the space of less than two generations.” He says “China is a huge and complex society with a powerful regime undergoing the most dramatic process of socio-economic change in world history. To describe this ongoing process as one of development is, if anything, an understatement. Indeed, the question is why we don’t learn from the Chinese.”
All this past week, we have seen starker indications of this new reality. The prime minister of Singapore told Financial Times that “we are certainly in the midst of a great transition to a post-American order” and – after decades of skepticism - The Economist acknowledged “China is winning the trade war [and] changing the path of the world economy.” Meanwhile, the “America First” cohort has given up trying to counterbalance China in Asia, as seen in their shocking and disgraceful turn against India and Japan. Instead, the Trumpists are trying tactical retreat to the Americas and Atlantic sphere: fantasies about annexing Greenland, chest-beating on Canada as 51st state, and – considerably less farcically – menacing and (probably imminently) invading Venezuela.
“China’s ascent during the age of globalization [is] the single most dramatic development in world economic history, bar none,” wrote the Columbia University professor Adam Tooze, in his popular and often prescient Chartbook online newsletter some time ago, outlining “utterly radical economic development in the space of less than two generations.” He says “China is a huge and complex society with a powerful regime undergoing the most dramatic process of socio-economic change in world history. To describe this ongoing process as one of development is, if anything, an understatement. Indeed, the question is why we don’t learn from the Chinese.”
Tooze was actually talking about the West, which consistently underestimated China and is now feeling disrupted and disturbed, but, of course, the identical question is even more pertinent in India. The two giant neighbours have peacefully co-existed and enriched each other for thousands of years – think of Bodhidharma, the Indian initiator of Zen Buddhism – and share intertwined histories of colonialism and liberation, including the horrific mid-19th century Opium Wars, when the British deployed Indian troops to subjugate China into buying drugs produced by virtual slave labour in India (all this is magnificently rendered in Amitav Ghosh’s masterpiece Ibis Trilogy). However, there was another potentially more redeeming connection via the Estado da Índia, when Macau was ruled from Goa for centuries. These are highly unusual and profound living ties: just last month, the Goan Macanese politician José Pereira Coutinho’s New Hope party ticket handily won the territory’s legislative election.
“If you look at Goa and Macau as civilizational hubs that connect both India and China to the Global South and the larger Lusosphere, then yes, there are important connections here,” says Constantino Xavier, the well-regarded foreign policy expert with Goan-Portuguese roots, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. He told me “both New Delhi and Beijing have used these small territories as bridges with the Portuguese-speaking world, but China has been far more strategic about it, and maybe that's something that India could learn from. It is rather paradoxical, as an authoritarian one-party state like the PRC has been more open towards Macau and the Lusosphere than an open, democratic and pluralist India. He believes this leaves “huge potential for cultural, heritage and economic collaboration between Goa and Macau.”
Xavier says “my sense is that Indian decision-makers are cautious but overall optimistic about the possibilities of a new less Western-centric global order. This optimism is in striking contrast with policy-makers I engage with in the US, Europe or Southeast Asia, who tend to be rather pessimistic, sometimes clinging on to old mantras and ways of doing things. Indian concerns, of course, are that China will replace the US as a new hegemonic power or develop a G2 condominium with the US: both are terrifying scenarios. But barring these two constellations, India is overall far more welcoming of a shift in global order, more commensurate with the current distribution of economic, demographic and other forms of power that are clearly anchored in Asia and across the Global South.” There is a flip side however: “We know that China sees India as an inferior power and will not accept a multipolar Asia. And we also know that India will not submit to an Asian order ruled by China, for a variety of political, economic and security reasons. But the reality is that the India-China power asymmetry is growing, making it increasingly costly for India to hang on to its vision of a plural, decentralized Asia.”
It is hard to explain to anyone who has not visited both countries just how big the divide has grown between India and China. Those comparisons were already glaring when I first visited Beijing in 1995, and they are the theme of Pallavi Aiyar’s excellent 2008 book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, “the first ever written by a Mandarin-speaking Indian foreign correspondent on China.”
Decades later, Aiyar has relocated back to China with her Spanish diplomat husband, and earlier this week via email, she told me “I am more convinced about the inevitability of a Chinese future now, having been back in Beijing for two months.” She says the communist party leadership turned out to be “unexpectedly self-correcting. Delivering on growth, plus balancing out excesses, remains the main source of its legitimacy. It gives you serious pause re democracy being the best/only ethical system of government regardless of other circumstances. With the US in free fall - I believe that barring something very left of field, this will be the Chinese century - the culmination of a long, 200 period of tussle that the nation has had with modernity.”
Aiyar says “the new world order could be an opportunity for India, were it to focus inwards on comprehensive development, and forging its own path to being a confident actor on the world stage. The latter does not come from posturing and being dependent on other great powers as leverage. What India needs is reforms across the board [and] if it is able to achieve real opportunities for growth for the majority of its citizens, create cities that are liveable and clean, ensure decent health and education - maybe, just maybe, the deeper problems of caste, religion, patriarchy etc can be overcome, so that India can become a self-respecting, strong, modern nation. In that case, a multipolar order where the West no longer rules the hegemonic roost would favour India. But India has not managed this in the decades (coming on a century) since 1947 and the outlook, I think, is dim.”
“If you look at Goa and Macau as civilizational hubs that connect both India and China to the Global South and the larger Lusosphere, then yes, there are important connections here,” says Constantino Xavier, the well-regarded foreign policy expert with Goan-Portuguese roots, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. He told me “both New Delhi and Beijing have used these small territories as bridges with the Portuguese-speaking world, but China has been far more strategic about it, and maybe that's something that India could learn from. It is rather paradoxical, as an authoritarian one-party state like the PRC has been more open towards Macau and the Lusosphere than an open, democratic and pluralist India. He believes this leaves “huge potential for cultural, heritage and economic collaboration between Goa and Macau.”
Xavier says “my sense is that Indian decision-makers are cautious but overall optimistic about the possibilities of a new less Western-centric global order. This optimism is in striking contrast with policy-makers I engage with in the US, Europe or Southeast Asia, who tend to be rather pessimistic, sometimes clinging on to old mantras and ways of doing things. Indian concerns, of course, are that China will replace the US as a new hegemonic power or develop a G2 condominium with the US: both are terrifying scenarios. But barring these two constellations, India is overall far more welcoming of a shift in global order, more commensurate with the current distribution of economic, demographic and other forms of power that are clearly anchored in Asia and across the Global South.” There is a flip side however: “We know that China sees India as an inferior power and will not accept a multipolar Asia. And we also know that India will not submit to an Asian order ruled by China, for a variety of political, economic and security reasons. But the reality is that the India-China power asymmetry is growing, making it increasingly costly for India to hang on to its vision of a plural, decentralized Asia.”
It is hard to explain to anyone who has not visited both countries just how big the divide has grown between India and China. Those comparisons were already glaring when I first visited Beijing in 1995, and they are the theme of Pallavi Aiyar’s excellent 2008 book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, “the first ever written by a Mandarin-speaking Indian foreign correspondent on China.”
Decades later, Aiyar has relocated back to China with her Spanish diplomat husband, and earlier this week via email, she told me “I am more convinced about the inevitability of a Chinese future now, having been back in Beijing for two months.” She says the communist party leadership turned out to be “unexpectedly self-correcting. Delivering on growth, plus balancing out excesses, remains the main source of its legitimacy. It gives you serious pause re democracy being the best/only ethical system of government regardless of other circumstances. With the US in free fall - I believe that barring something very left of field, this will be the Chinese century - the culmination of a long, 200 period of tussle that the nation has had with modernity.”
Aiyar says “the new world order could be an opportunity for India, were it to focus inwards on comprehensive development, and forging its own path to being a confident actor on the world stage. The latter does not come from posturing and being dependent on other great powers as leverage. What India needs is reforms across the board [and] if it is able to achieve real opportunities for growth for the majority of its citizens, create cities that are liveable and clean, ensure decent health and education - maybe, just maybe, the deeper problems of caste, religion, patriarchy etc can be overcome, so that India can become a self-respecting, strong, modern nation. In that case, a multipolar order where the West no longer rules the hegemonic roost would favour India. But India has not managed this in the decades (coming on a century) since 1947 and the outlook, I think, is dim.”
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