My first Harvard College students' conference:

This year 2006, academics from around the world came together for a 3-days conference in Singapore during the weekend from 17th up to 19th of August before Mumbai was the venue for the Business Forum one week later on, where the academics discussed with professionals about Asian-related topics.  A stay in the City of Gold, formerly known as Bombay, was worth about everything.

I attended the Business Forum in Mumbai only. My journey began on the 22nd of August having headed from Munich via Frankfurt to Mumbai. Upon my arrival at the Chatrapati Shivaji Mumbai International Airport I was surprised to see old friends while I have gone through the exit gate. Eric and Arke, father and son of my very own beloved Indian family, were awaiting me for about an hour. The following 2 days then, I stayed in Bandra where I have been already nicely welcomed about 3 years ago when I came along with my girl Cigdem to India the first time. On Thursday evening, I took a rikshaw ride back to the Airport in order to pick up 2 good old friends, Waldemar and his brother André, whom I was supposed to chill together with at Thailand's scenic beaches. We put up at the Grand Hyatt where we ckecked into an upgraded club room - very nice room! Now that we made ourselves comfortable, we looked forward the upcoming days scheduled with plenty of auspicious events - the Harvard College Asian Business Forum as well as the annual general meeting of the Indo-German chamber of commerce.

Enclosed by, the pictures give you some brief impressions of what we experienced:

The next Highlight is coming up soon. Manhattan is the venue for the first China-India Development & Relations Symposium. What are your plans over Eastern?

Dear fellows from HPAIR as well as SPAIR, please check the following about what I conducted so far about areas of development or international relations over which China and India will potentially cooperate or conflict in the future:

Potential conflicts that might arise from unilaterally fostering relationships with countries that are of strategic meaning for both countries – an analogy to the fears of Russia resulting from the EU enlargement process

Over the recent decade, India and China have written an incredible story of success in terms of economic prosperity, foreign direct investments, the level of education and the gradual transition from low-cost manufacturing economies to those ones distinguished by enormous R&D investment figures aiming at becoming knowledge based and innovation driven economies. Since the 1990’s, when Japanese car manufacturers began also to sell large, powerful, and fancy cars in the U.S. market as did the U.S Big Three exclusively before, it became eminently obvious that the Ricardian logic about “comparative advantages”, determining which countries are doing better in producing a particular bunch of products over others with respect to the terms of trade, does not longer hold.

This current path of development, these two nations walk on, is broken as ground by another two nations, Russia and Brazil, too. These four nations are called the BRIC states, using the mnemonic used in a famous Goldman Sachs thesis published in 2003. Apart from Brazil, whose role I exclude in my essay, I just slightly want to stress the role Russian plays for the China-India relationship. Furthermore, I want to point out why some Eurasian organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the 10 ASEAN countries for instance have a potential impact as to turn the scale of the relationship between China and India.

Nowadays, the current state of development has caused China and India to step into an new era where they can not afford any longer to neglect each other. As already discussed during the last HPAIR Business Forum in Mumbai in August 2006, it is certainly cliché to term China and India as the international market's future dominant figures, however given their relatively enormous populations, supremacy in the manufacturing, IT and now R&D sectors, and dangerously populated and well-furnished militaries, China and India are certainly posed to command significant global attention. Therefore, they are urged to take up responsibility that is especially called for by many questions seeking to respond to whether a growth in economic prosperity in these countries will lead to a safer or more unstable Asia. Internally, each country has its own struggles to surpass before reaching market ascendancy, from rampant rural poverty and illiteracy, to energy requirements and environmental degradation (“China and India Emphasize Cooperation” by Amelia Gentleman, 21.11.06 – New York Times).

A few weeks ago on November the 21^st this year, the Chinese President Hu Jintao came for a visit to India, the first time by a Chinese president to India in 10 years. At the start of this visit that did not promise any substantive new agreements, President Hu Jintao and his Indian host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, unveiled a 10-point plan that aims to double bilateral trade to $40 billion by 2010. In a joint statement, they declared that the simultaneous development of India and China will have a positive influence on the future international system in the emerging multi-polar global order. The outcome of this state visit reveals that the polictical dialogue between these two countries reached a level where the emphasis on collaboration has been mutually recognized even though there was no indication of coming forth in any issues of conflicts like the border disputes for instance. India shares with China a common border line of 3,380 km. The tense nature of dialogues between India and China was exposed once again just very recently when China reiterated Beijing’s claim to the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. It seems that the broader meaning of cooperation has been stripped down to the narrow sense of collaboration that is reflected by a pragmatic political program tackling only those sort of issues that are not loaded with problems. The will to cooperate in the field of civilian nuclear energy was also affirmed. By pledging this, especially China reponds to the activities of Russia that is already building two 1,000-megawatt nuclear power reactors in Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu. And here Russia comes into play - as well as, though to a lesser extent, the other countries belonging to some Eurasian organizations I mentioned above.  In December 2002, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an extraordinary diplomatic 5-days trip to China, and from there, directly to India. While meeting representatives as well as students from China, Putin described the international importance of Russian-Chinese economic projects that were not only tangibly beneficial for both sides but they modify the whole configuration of the economic infrastructure of Eurasia. A few days later in New Delhi, Putin told that the development of a transport corridor extending from India, via Iran, into Russia is the main strategic objective of the Russia-India partnership.

Dear room mates from Munich, Washington and Irvine, dear CIDRS fellows,

after all I now found the time to download the picture I have taken from these few but exciting 4 days in City. It's been again an amazing experience to get to know people from HPAIR travelling the world. Hopefully I will meet some of you again on this little tiny planet. In the following there is the entire compilation of picture I took: