One of the debates that's been going on among readers of Minxin Pei's piece 'China's not a Superpower' over on our APAC 2020 feature has been how exactly to define a superpower. Is it just about military or economic strength, for example, or do you need a vision and governing system that inspires other nations to emulate it?

Certainly a strong military seems a pre-requisite (though it would have been interesting to see if Japan, with its constitutional bar on holding an offensive military capability, could have earned the superpower label had it achieved the world's largest economy status some predicted).

With this in mind then, what about India? The hundreds of millions living in poverty are one consideration (though the same could be said of China). But whereas China has been rolling out for public view some impressive hardware, and developing a maritime force to be reckoned with, the past week has seen a series of media reports on some serious Indian shortcomings.

Delhi-based journalist Shriv Aroor, for example, has this piece on India actually going backwards with its submarine force, which according to one report is set to shrink to the size of neighbour Pakistan by 2015.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_o_no4M2xEPY/S1VNMZ8I0PI/AAAAAAAAJIM/0hyQYk6LHIw/s1600-h/2030125-721333.jpg

Meanwhile, Asian Defence blog last week had this piece stating that 80 percent of India's tanks were night blind:

http://theasiandefence.blogspot.com/2010/01/80-percent-of-indias-battle-tanks-were.html

Both points certainly bolster the case US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is making in a visit to India today for allowing greater foreign investment in India's defence industry.

The audacious attacks claimed by the Taliban yesterday in Kabul, targeting shopping centres, government buildings and a hotel, claimed several lives, with several dozen more people injured. But the psychological impact is likely to be far more powerful and lasting as Afghan President Hamid Karzai struggles to put together his government.

Pakistan's Dawn newspaper is scathing over the apparent failure of US-led forces:

'It is quite obvious from yesterday's incidents that the huge US-led ISAF force of over 100,000, has failed even to secure the Afghan Capital Kabul against attacks from the resistance. All they have done during the past eight years or so in the country is to cause widespread havoc, kill people by the tens of thousands, lay waste vast tracts of land and pulverise mountains.'

Of course this interpretation ignores the fact that a brutal governing regime was removed from power, one whose fighters are now also battling Pakistani forces in Waziristan, as one of our contributors reported this week. Indeed he notes the failure of Pakistani forces to prevent numerous high-profile attacks at the heart of the country, attacks prompted by a Pakistan-led offensive, not a US one.

It's unclear what impact the surge announced late last year by Obama will do, or whether it will succeed. It might very well not. But implying that a full US withdrawal would magically eliminate the Taliban threat is fanciful, to put it kindly.

I talked at the time about the massacre that claimed dozens of lives in the southern Philippines in November. One of the inevitable consequences of the 24-hour news cycle is that once the horrific pictures have been screened and the death toll finalized, reporters inevitably move on to the next news flashpoint.

But what about the longer-term repercussions of these events? I asked Luke Hunt, one of our Southeast Asia correspondents who is putting together a piece for us on the aftermath of the massacre, for his take on exactly this issue. He told me:

'By any measurement the War Lords of Mindanao outdid themselves on November 23. The sheer callousness of the massacre that left 57 people dead and half-buried in mass graves managed to get their bloody local differences back into the foreign pages of the world's newspapers.

'For years, foreign editors have preferred to ignore the civil conflict that has dominated the Southern Philippines since the 1970s. The fact is life on the west coast of Mindanao is just as dangerous as the southern provinces of Afghanistan or the hinterland of Iraq.

'But a combination of fatigue and a lack of relevance to the outside world firmly pushed the insurgencies and the tragedies of life among the militias towards the bottom of the news agenda.

'There were exceptions. Initially, when local bandits masquerading as freedom fighters crossed the sea border into Malaysia, began kidnapping Western tourists and ransoming them off.

'That group was the Abu Sayyaf who, along with the regional terrorists outfit Jemaah Islamiyah, gained in notoriety once their ties to Islamic independence groups in Mindanao were laid bare in the aftermath of the 2001 strikes against New York and Washington.

'The United States declared the Philippines the second front and poured millions of dollars into the country's south.

'However, the massacre has highlighted the double standards between Manila and the powerful family militias, particularly in light of upcoming elections, and raised serious doubts about American efforts to combat insurgencies and secure the area.'

China's Internet is open. Except when it isn't.  China's foreign ministry made the first claim Thursday following Google's suggestion this week that it might pull out of China. But as I've said previously, the conflicting reality to these statements is often painfully obvious, at least outside China.

 I was reminded of my trip to Beijing, for example, where for some reason the BBC was unavailable for my entire visit. More recently our systems team was perplexed as to why a single image wasn't showing on the site we were developing. It turned out the (Chinese bought) software one our team was using had a firewall blocking access to file names with the word defence in (the picture file name included this word).

But before anyone is too quick to praise Google for taking a stand on censorship, blogger and author Nicholas Carr has a very interesting take on Google's possibly less than pure motivations.

Carr says:

'If Google had not, as it revealed in its announcement, "detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China," there's no reason to believe it would have altered its policy of censoring search results to fit the wishes of the Chinese authorities. It was the attack, not a sudden burst of righteousness, that spurred Google's action.'

In a footnote to my entry Tuesday I mentioned that China had overtaken Germany to become the world's largest exporter. The news comes on the back of the implementation of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area agreement, which went into effect January 1.

But while the agreement, which was first announced at a summit in 2001 and is the third-largest such agreement of its kind in the world, was broadly welcomed in Southeast Asia as an opportunity to boost exports, it seems the picture is more complex for some member nations.

According to Joe Cochrane, deputy editor of the Jakarta Globe, Indonesia, for one, has failed to prepare its industries for the realities of tougher competition. He told me yesterday:

'While there was lots of coverage [in Indonesia] on its impact.no one seemed to write about the fact that [Indonesian officials] had never taken any steps since signing the agreement to get their state-owned enterprises competitive and set up government-sponsored programs to help the private sector improve competitiveness, upgrade equipment, training, techniques, etc.'

However, when casting around for someone to blame, Cochrane told me Indonesian businesses need to take a look in the mirror.

'This is part of the decades old mentality among Indonesian business that they have some sort of entitlement, and that foreign competition isn't allowed. Well, in this day and age--with globalization -- those things are over. These industries will no longer get carte blanche, but they just can't seem to accept it. They're unproductive and not competitive specifically because they had no urgency to become so. And now they're in deep trouble.'

There have already reportedly been protests in west Java over the agreement, and trade union leaders have called for a formal review. Interestingly, though, although an ASEAN free trade agreement signed with India that went into force the same day seems to have gone down better in Jakarta, it has been worrying Indian policymakers.

The Bernama news site quotes an Indian official as saying:

'The business community supports the agreement, that is a positive significance but there had been lot of criticism from states like Kerala, such as tea and coffee planters. Now some sectors will surely come under pressure at home.

'ASEAN will gain substantially from the market access and ASEAN's exports to India will increase substantially, but our exports will be modest.'

I wrote a couple of months back about how it was going to be interesting watching India's Bharatiya Janata Party try and bounce back from its electoral thumping at the hands of the Congress Party last May.

Well, since then, the BJP has selected a new president, Nitin Jayaram Gadkari, who the party hopes will help it make the generational transition necessary for it to regain its footing. Fifty-two-year-old Gadkari is the youngest-ever president of the party and took over last month vowing to focus on helping the poor.

Our India contributor, veteran commentator Madhav Nalapat, is putting a piece together on the party's recent travails. Before then, though, I asked him what has been going on with the BJP. He told me:

'During the 1990s, it seemed as though the BJP was unstoppable. Riding on the twin waves of Hindu Pride and nationalism, the party came to power in 1998 and increased its tally of seats the next year, in the election that followed the Congress-inspired withdrawal of support to the BJP-led government by the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.

'However, the party crashed to defeat in 2004, and repeated that dismal performance in 2009, despite widespread voter dissatisfaction at inflation and misgovernment of the ruling Congress-led coalition. Of late, the BJP seems confused and in danger of losing its base.'

It's always big news when a national airline goes bankrupt, and especially so in an economy the size of Japan's. But one of the interesting things in the case of Japan Airlines is what it might be saying about a shift in the government's strategy.

As this BusinessWeek piece points out, JAL has been coddled by successive Japanese administrations, and the Democratic Party of Japan had indicated it would do much the same. But the party had also promised to rethink some of the cosy government-big business ties that had marked more than 50 years of virtually uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, and it has, finally, taken a tougher line on JAL:

'Hatoyama, 62, on Sept. 30 told reporters: "I fully believe JAL can restructure itself," and pledged to give it more backing. Transport Minister Seiji Maehara on Nov. 11 said the Development Bank of Japan would provide a bridge loan for an undisclosed amount.

'A week later Maehara told a parliamentary committee that the government wouldn't rule out bankruptcy. He then pushed the carrier's retired workers to accept pension cuts to help with restructuring.

'"The historical view of the Japanese government, that it must support certain sectors or companies regardless of the cost to the Japanese taxpayer, is changing very significantly," said Ed Rogers, chief executive officer of Tokyo-based hedge-fund adviser Rogers Investment Advisors Y.K.'

Government 'assistance' has anyway been a double-edged sword for JAL--despite an extensive (and hugely efficient) rail network servicing a landmass smaller than that of California, Japan still has almost 100 airports. Yet it and fellow Japanese airline ANA have serviced many of the routes at a loss because of political and regulatory pressure (a report last year by the Asahi said almost three-quarters of the two airlines' domestic routes operated at a loss).

And there's still plenty of scope yet for the DPJ to give the stale government-business ties a thorough and necessary airing.

On a related note, while Japan struggles to find its economic policy footing (its finance minister resigned this month, supposedly on health grounds, though it's widely believed he's fallen foul of DPJ 'Shadow Shogun' Ichiro Ozawa) China has become the world's largest exporter, surpassing Germany.

Daniel Ikenson at the Cato Institute has a useful take on what this new status as top exporter does, and doesn't say, about China:

'[W]e should avoid the temptation to attach the wrong meaning to the title. China has become the world's largest exporter primarily because the global division of labor that has helped reduce the burdens of poverty and create greater wealth still prescribes for China the role of lower-value-added production and final assembly operations in global production/supply chains.'

Two interesting, related articles I came across today--one an analysis one a news item. The first was a piece in the Economist's Banyan column, looking at how China's smiling diplomacy is starting to look a little strained. It essentially makes the point I've made here a few times that China is going to be judged more on its actions than its words, and that plans cooked up at home might not look so good under the unpredictable spotlight of international scrutiny. Banyan says:

'China's clout makes a mockery of two guiding tenets of its charm offensive: relations on the basis of equality; and non-interference.

'That calls for a new diplomacy. China's presentational problems with the old one speak of an abiding lack of sophistication, and an attachment to a ritualistic diplomacy ill-suited to fast-moving negotiations, such as in Copenhagen, where the outcome is not pre-cooked.'

China's charm offensive has also been in evidence over the past year in relations with Taiwan. The election of Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou heralded warmer ties then under Ma's predecessor. But China demonstrated it won't play nicely if it doesn't get its own way with the island, with an announcement yesterday covered in the China Daily warning the US of severe consequences if it goes through with a major arms sale to Taiwan.

I asked Taiwanese editor and blogger Leonard Chien if this story, headline news in the China Daily, was as big in Taiwan as the mainland. He said yes, in part because of the light it could shed on ties with the US generally:

'It will become a big topic for media discussion, whether in the papers or on TV. Taiwan and the United States are going through serious negotiations regarding US beef imports (which Taiwan has this week blocked on health grounds).

'Some experts claim this impasse will jeopardize future bilateral negotiation, be it an FTA, our visa-free status or the arms sale. So, if this arms sale is to happen, to some people, what--and how much--is in the sale will be a good indicator of Taiwan-US relations.'

The issue of the arms sale of course begs the question of how much of a military threat Taiwanese see China, despite Ma's efforts at improving ties. Chien told me:

'Some people still consider China a serious military threat [and] it's a fact that China still places hundreds of missiles targeting Taiwan, no matter how economically integrated the two sides are.

'As long as both sides still conduct military exercises with the other as the potential enemy, the tension--especially military--will not disappear. So it's understandable that some Taiwanese still regard China as a military threat and strongly support arms sale from the US.'

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak may profess to have a vision of 'One Malaysia,' but it's looking like an increasingly strange interpretation of harmony and unity.

Supposedly (depending on who you listen to) secular Malaysia has a majority Muslim population (about 60 percent) but also sizeable Indian and Chinese communities. Yet the government has increasingly been pandering to its conservative base in what critics say is an effort to deflect from its political shortcomings.

The latest example was the government's announcement Sunday that it would appeal a High Court ruling allowing non-Muslims the right to use the word Allah. This appeal comes on the back of hotel raids by the country's Islamic morality police on New Year's Day in which dozens of couples were arrested for sharing confined spaces.

The government undoubtedly has its eye on the growing popularity of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, which has called for the extended use of Sharia law and which made significant electoral inroads in the 2008 general election. But such moves to court more conservative voters are a disappointing and dangerous game that no amount of woolly rhetoric over inclusiveness can hide.

I mentioned late last month the importance of China-Pakistan ties and their implications for India. So it's worth also mentioning growing defence ties between India and Russia.

Asian Defence has an interesting post on an Indian delegation to Siberia that has been taking a look at the Sukhoi T-50, a fifth-generation fighter being built by Russia. The news follows reports like this one on Brahmand.com on the uptick in defence-related deals between the two last year:

'This year top Indian powers visited Russia -- President Pratibha Patil in September followed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in December -- to concrete the association between the two nations after New Delhi's pro-US tilt.

'India has given a green signal to [keep] Russia as its key strategic partner after signing an umbrella civilian nuclear deal and inter-governmental agreement by another 10 years till 2020, as [reported by Prime Minister's Office] sources.'

The idea that the US sees India as a counterweight to China is an oft-talked about one. But India-Russia ties could become very interesting in light of the likely growing tensions between China and Russia over China's populating of Siberia. John Lee, who contributed one of our main APAC 2020 feature essays, covers exactly this issue, arguing:

'China will be the only great power in Asia that remains dissatisfied with its land and maritime borders. To its north, new tensions are likely over oil, coal and timber rich Russian territories in its Far East and Siberian land mass. There's already an estimated 100,000 Chinese illegally settling in these areas. By 2020, it's likely that over 100 million Chinese will be living in the Chinese territories within several hundred kilometres of the porous Russian border with only 5 to 10 million Russians remaining in the region. Siberia's fresh water supply would also be tempting, given that China already has severe shortages throughout the country.'