Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia [Hardcover]
- Author by Myint-U, Thant
From Publisher
From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River.
Soon this last great frontier will vanish--the forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies crushed--leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography--as sudden and profound as the opening of the Suez Canal--will lead to unprecedented connections among the three billion people of Southeast Asia and the Far East.
What will this change mean? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. Over the past few years he has traveled extensively across this vast territory, where high-speed trains and gleaming new shopping malls are now coming within striking distance of the last far-flung rebellions and impoverished mountain communities. And he has explored the new strategic centrality of Burma, where Asia's two rising, giant powers appear to be vying for supremacy.
At once a travelogue, a work of history, and an informed look into the future, "Where China Meets India "takes us across the fast-changing Asian frontier, giving us a masterful account of the region's long and rich history and its sudden significance for the rest of the world.
Reviews
- From Publishers Weekly
- Policy analysis, travelogue, and history combine in the latest from former UN diplomat Thant (The River of Lost Footsteps). Focuses on his home country of Burma, and the area encompassed by a diameter of 1,000 miles drawn from the city of Mandalay on the edge of the Shan Plateau, Thant suggests that this corner of the world (with a population of 600 million) is destined to become a bridge between Bengal, Bangladesh, India's North Eastern Provinces, and China's Yunnan province. As China moves down to the coast, the pipelines, refineries, hydro-electric dams, and transmission lines presently under construction are setting the stage. Thant foresees conditions in which both Burma's military rulers and India will seek to balance China's outreach, with a flowering of economic potential as a possible result. Thant's knowledge of Burma's history, peoples, cultures, and kingdoms brings focus to his travels through the area. The constant interplay between his experiences and knowledge of the region make this book a gem, with myriad rare insights. (Sept.) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.
Quote Reviews
"'Asia' is already the 21st century's most contested term. For some it represents a block comprising most of the world's population, for others a region rife with historical rivalries. In this engaging narrative, Thant Myint-U shows us how Asia is still under construction, with new ports, canals, railroads and passageways are knitting together a continent. Most interestingly, these new Silk Roads enjoin the world's two most populous nations, China and India, via Burma, a land of incredible diversity and promise, but also despair and risk. If the presumed geopolitical rivalries in Asia are to be averted, it will be by following Thant's road-map." --Parag Khanna, author of "The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order" and "How to Run the World"
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""Where China Meets India" is a rare find, an ambitious, comprehensive work that is at once entertaining and illuminating by a leading scholar on Burma." --Andrew Pham, author of "The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three
"[A] blend of personal reminiscence, history--enlivened with an eye for the telling anecdote--travelogue and polemic." --"The Economist"
"["Where China Meets India"] possesses a heartfelt and welcome optimism, giving voice to a desire for connections that exceeds all notions of foreign policy, geopolitics or business and becomes, instead, about people encountering each other in all their glorious difference." --Siddhartha Deb, "The Guardian""Thant Myint-U makes clear in "Where China Meets India "[that] Burma's days as a neglected backwater are over." --Tim Johnston, "Financial Times" "This is probably the best book written on Myanmar after 1988. It is a must-read not only for diplomats, political analysts and CEOs of multinationals but also for readers who enjoy racy narrative, fascinating accounts of a bygone era, of Shangri-La, kings and generals, intrigue and heroism, the Tarons, remnants of the only known pigmy race in mainland Asia, and the lives of common people in some of t
