Letter From the Editors
Relationships between states – and governments and their people – can be difficult to manage when interests diverge.
Welcome to the May issue of The Diplomat Magazine.
The international system is little more than a tapestry of relationships woven together: between people and governments, states and their partners, enemies and allies. Diverging interests can drive partners apart and overlapping concerns bring former enemies together. Time can erode our understanding of the relationship between past and present, as governments twist narratives to suit contemporary needs. In this issue of The Diplomat magazine, we pay special attention to an array of complex relationships, from China’s understanding of its own roots to the evolving dynamics between the United States and the Philippines, and from India and Pakistan’s tumultuous relationship to the precarious balance maintained by Kazakhstan vis-a-vis its people and the behemoth, China, next door.
In our cover story, Sebastian Veg explains how modern China’s foundational moment – May 4, 1919 – has taken on many meanings in the 100 years since. Veg, a professor of contemporary history of China at EHESS (Paris), traces the evolution of commemorations remembering the May Fourth Movement to get to the reality of the events in which modern China has its roots. Ambiguities and contradictions abound: The kind of academic freedom at the heart of the May Fourth Movement is at present heavily repressed in China, yet the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the May 4 anniversary as an outburst of patriotism.
The India-Pakistan bilateral relationship is among the most fraught in the world. May marks 20 years since the 1999 Kargil War – the first actual hot war between nuclear powers – and the anniversary comes mere months after India and Pakistan approached the brink of war again. As Sameer Lalwani and Eyal Hanfling – a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center and a research assistant in the program, respectively – write, a careful parsing of the Kargil War’s consequences can help us understand the 2019 Balakot crisis and what both can tell us about the future of conflict in South Asia.
Then we turn to the Kazakhstan-China relationship. On the surface, Nur-Sultan (the new name of Kazakhstan’s capital, formerly known as Astana) and Beijing have a solid partnership, predicated on the energy trade and in more recent years China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative. But as Nazira Kozhanova, a Master’s student in political science at the University of British Columbia (UBC), outlines, the costs of the partnership are on the rise in light of China’s massive detention of Muslims – ethnic Kazakhs included – in Xinjiang and rising domestic agitation in Kazakhstan in response. Other domestic irritants, combined with a sudden power transition and Nur-Sultan’s standard reaction of suppressing public protests, have further shaken Kazakhstan, but not Nur-Sultan’s resolve to handle the Xinjiang matter quietly, by force if necessary.
The longstanding partnership between the United States and the Philippines is in desperate need of reinvigoration, 68 years after the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) was signed. As Jay L. Batongbacal, an associate professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law, explains, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s March clarification in Manila that the Washington would honor its commitments under the MDT should a Philippine vessel or aircraft be attacked in the South China Sea was met, almost paradoxically, with mixed reactions in the Philippines. For a relationship encroaching on 70 years, the classic fears of either abandonment or entrapment within the alliance remain vivid. It’s time for the partnership to evolve.
We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.