In the global chessboard of geopolitics, rare earth elements (REEs) are the new power pieces. Their strategic importance continues to escalate, especially for nations like India with a burgeoning technology sector. This is underscored by the Indian governments recent unveiling of a list of 30 critical minerals integral to national security and active efforts to establish a domestic semiconductor manufacturing plant. Essential to hi-tech and renewable energy industries, REEs dominance by Chinawhich controls over 80-90% of the global marketposes a significant challenge, leaving nations like India in an uncomfortable position of dependence on their eastern neighbor.

Africa the sleeping giant of REE reserves remains largely underexplored. Its rich REE deposits in countries like Burundi and Tanzania wait in the wings due to lack of technology and investment. However, the narrative is rapidly changing with China weaving its intricate web of influence in Africas REE sector. Yet Chinas largesse comes with a price. Its notorious debt-trap diplomacy ensnares economically vulnerable nations into an unending cycle of debt, exemplified by Zambia, Djibouti, and Angola.

In stark contrast to China, India has always aimed to pursue a non-extractive and sustainable approach in all its engagements. Indias External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, recently reaffirmed Indias non-expansionist and inclusive approach towards Africa. Thus, India, not China, at least over the longer term, clearly emerges as the preferred partner for Africa, setting the stage for a strategic repositioning of Indias influence in the continent.

The Winning Factor

An underappreciated facet of Indias connection with Africa is the vibrant Indian diaspora, which numbers over 3 million. Integrated into Africas socioeconomic fabric, the Indian diaspora has proven its mettle in the trade, manufacturing, and services sectors. This network, with its deep-rooted ties and understanding of local contexts, could be the catalyst for Indias enhanced engagement with the African REE sector.

History, as it often does, offers lessons on how diasporas can contribute to their home countries economic prosperity and strategic security. The Chinese diaspora, for instance, has been a driving force behind approximately 70% of Chinas direct investment in Southeast Asia. Likewise, the Jewish diaspora annually remits approximately $3.8 billion to Israel. Its evident that diasporas can significantly contribute to their home economies and strategic security, and Indias diaspora in Africa is no exception. The task for India, then, is to draw upon this playbook...

With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the hypercities of the Global South, including Delhi, So Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the megacities of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York.¹ Walking the streets in Chinas cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common to most of the rest of the world.

Slums were not uncommon in Chinese cities a few decades ago, from the precarious working class districts of 1930s Shanghai to the shanty towns of British-occupied Hong Kong in the 1950s onwards. How did China manage to develop in a way that decreased mass housing precarity?  What are the structural reasons behind it?

This issue of Dongsheng Explains looks into how the Chinese government deals with homelessness, how this issue relates to socialist construction, and how China confronts the challenges posed by rapid economic development, urbanization, and the migration of recent decades.

Why did mass urbanization not create large slums in China?

When reform and opening up began in the late 1970s, 83 percent of Chinas population lived in the countryside. By 2021, the proportion of the rural population had fallen to 36 percent. During this period of mass urbanization, over 600 million people migrated from rural areas to cities.

Today, there are 296 million internal migrant workers (, nngmn gng), comprising over 70 percent of the countrys total workforce.² Migrant workers became the economic engine of Chinas rapid growth, which created the worlds largest middle class of 400 million people.

...

Human Wrongs Watch

By Thalif Deen

Standing army?, the diplomat asked with mock surprise, and remarked perhaps half-jokingly, We dont even have a sitting army.

With a population of about 250,000, around that time, the Maldives was perhaps one of the few countries with no fighter planes, combat helicopters, warships, missiles or battle tanksan open invitation for mercenaries and free-lance military adventurers.

As a result, the islands fragile defenses attracted a rash of mercenaries and bounty hunters who tried to take over the country twice once in 1979, and a second time in 1988.

Although both attempts failed, the Indian Ocean-island refused to drop its defenses. It not only initiated a proposal seeking a UN security umbrella to protect the worlds militarily-vulnerable mini states but also backed an international convention to outlaw mercenaries, namely the 1989 International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries

In the US, a mercenary is called a soldier of fortune, which is also the title of a widely circulated magazine, and sub-titled the Journal of Professional Adventurers.

The adventures and mis-adventures of mercenaries were also portrayed in several Hollywood movies, including the Dogs of War, Tears of the Sun, the Wild Geese, the Expendables, and Blood Diamond, among others.

When the Russian Wagner Group hit the front pages of newspapers worldwide, it was described as a private mercenary group fighting in Ukraine.

The New York Times said on June 30 the Wagner Group provided security to African presidents, propped up dictators, violently suppressed rebel uprisings and was accused of torture, murder of civilians and other abuses.

But the failed coup attempt by Wagner threatened, for a moment, the very existence of the Group.

A military...

Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and coy.  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary emissions in visiting friendly countries.  Each time, he seems to be getting away with more and more, currying (pun intended) favour with his hosts and landing the necessary deals.

For all the excitement of going to a fellow cricket loving state such as Australia, no one was under any illusion about the prize.  Easy gains there on matters of commerce, education and security: a pliant PM, a pliant Cabinet, a political and business class hungering for access to a country which recently passed China as the most populous on the planet.  In all of this, Modi had the audacity to urge Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to do something about reported acts of vandalism against Hindu temples in Melbourne.

In scale, nothing was going to compare to courting the superpower that, for all its might, teeters.  On his June visit to the United States, Modi was building on earlier efforts to show India as a viable partner in a number of areas.

The Modi visit exemplified the calculations of the moment.  The US has been rather clumsy of late, engaging in a foreign policy described by former US Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers, as a bit lonely.  US foreign policy makers have tended to miss a bit or two, not least understanding the value Indian officials place on their military relationship with Moscow.  The Indian political establishment is also mindful about how useful New Delhi is seen in Washington, the traditional counter to Beijing. That counter, however, is seen as subordinate to maintaining US supremacy under the lecturing guise of the rules-based order.

Such poses are simply not acceptable in either the Modi worldview or those of Indian policy makers.  As Indias External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has opined with a tart frankness, Washingtons power can be described as a transient moment of American unipolarity.  To assume, arrogantly, that history was at its end at the conclusion of the Cold War was a Eurocentric analysis jettisoned by nationalism. It is exactly such nationalism that Modi brims with.

The joint statement from the two countries made familiar, and predictable assumptions.  Much of it was frothy.  Both Biden and Modi affirmed a vision of the United States and India as among the closest partners in the world a partnership of democracies looking into the 21^st century with hope, ambition, and confidence.  Naturally, there is no mention of Modis nationalistic...