New India-US clash, Why Xi mentions the war, China’s marriage revolution - Asian Media Report

India has decided to go public about its disagreements with the Trump Administration, saying it has been an insensitive partner on Delhi’s concerns over terrorism, it has warmed to arch-rival Pakistan and it has pursued self-centred trade policies that have hurt the Global South. S. Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister, said in a New York speech it was no consolation to say much of the world had had a more difficult relationship with the US.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Donald Trump by phone this week and said the call had been productive – a description an analytical piece in Al Jazeera said was cold and formal, in contrast to past descriptions of Trump as a good friend.

And Navtej Sarna, a foreign policy elder statesman, said of US arrogance: “It is time to call the bully’s bluff.”

The Al Jazeera story said that for decades India had handled divisive issues with otherwise friendly nations quietly, behind the scenes. “However, after months of tensions, New Delhi is adopting a more openly critical tone towards Washington, to address the volatility and uncertainty that Trump brings to the White House,” it said.

“The changing tune in New Delhi comes at a critical time for … Modi, who faces mounting domestic pressure and criticism from the opposition for allegedly bowing down to US pressure, time and again.”

The story said Jaishankar began his speech, delivered to the Asia Society this week, by referring to the economic spillover of the Ukraine and Iran wars. “Countries should not be so self-centred that you’re in your own world and take your decision and say, ‘Well, it was not my intention to make your life difficult’,” he said.

Last month, the US Congress passed, and Trump signed, a law that would let the US impose 100 per cent tariffs on countries, like India, that buy Russian oil. The story quoted retired diplomat Ajay Bisaria as saying the new tariff, due to come into effect this month, was a dealbreaker in the relationship.

Navtej Sarna, a former head of Indian missions in the UK and the US, said that in relations between states there were moments of great clarity when situations must be assessed without excuse, apology or gloss. “The Russian sanctions law is such a moment in the India-US relationship,” he said in a column in The Week, an Indian news magazine. It was time to get to the heart  of the matter.

“We need to accept, without caveats, that the relationship has cratered significantly,” he said. “In America’s eyes, India is not the strategic partner that we believed we were.

“It is self-deluding to put the blame solely on Donald Trump… What we are seeing goes beyond even the most destructive personality. Economic nationalism, racial supremacism, moral poverty, naked aggression and wanton disregard for international law and norms are trends that will outlast Trump.”

The death toll from the devastating flooding that has afflicted Thailand since late last week has reached 40 people. Four of the deaths were in Bangkok.

Across the border in Myanmar, the toll from flooding in the port city of Dawei, about 600km southeast of Yangon, was recorded at 32 by Tuesday and the number was expected to rise.

Torrential wet-season rain started falling on Thursday, 24 September and kept falling over the following four days, mainly hitting Bangkok and the central plains as a strong low-pressure system settled over the region and the southwest monsoon strengthened.

It was Thailand’s worst flooding since the terrible floods of 2011 (when the official death toll was 815). On 26 September, Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt declared all of Bangkok’s 50 districts to be disaster zones.

Main roads, shops and houses were flooded, with waters often close to car-roof height. Some 700,000 people were affected in Bangkok; thousands could not leave their homes to go to shops or get to work.

This led to an unexpected chaos at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, the main gateway to Thailand. Thai Airways International did not have enough workers to run their baggage operations and passengers were forced to leave the airport without their luggage.

Bangkok Post said 10,000 pieces of luggage from weekend flights had piled up at the airport but by Wednesday only 18 per cent had been reunited with their owners.

The airline cancelled 59 domestic and international flights as it struggled to reduce the massive baggage backlog.

Tourism and Sports Minister Surasak Phancharoenworakul accused the airline of assigning its limited ground-handling staff to other airlines with which it had contracts, out of concern that it might incur penalties, the Thai PBS World news site said. He said airline executives should consider resigning if they could not solve the problem.

A commentary in Bangkok Post on Friday blamed national and local governments for failing to prevent, warn and provide adequate emergency responses and evacuation plans. “It is safe to say that our weak governance is the root cause of this crisis,” said the analysis, written by Anucha Charoenpo, the paper’s news editor.

In Myanmar, The Irrawaddy, a Burmese exile news site, said rescue workers were struggling to reach thousands of people cut off by landslides and rising flood waters. Authorities had reported more than 20 villages in one township area were submerged and another 10 hit by landslides.

The death toll in the region had climbed to 32, and dozens more were missing, it said.

When Xi Jinping went to Washington in 2015, he wanted the US to treat China as a great power. His remarks were aspirational. Eleven years later, visiting the White House for a summit with Donald Trump, he sounds much the same but the difference is the strength the country behind him, according to China observer Tan Dawn Wei.

China’s economy faced serious problems, Tan said, and it was still much smaller than America’s in nominal dollar terms. But in several key technologies (such as electric vehicles) China was ahead of the US. By some accounts, it had effectively closed the AI gap and it was in front in research and development spending, although it was well behind in spending on the military.

“But China is now sufficiently powerful across enough dimensions that the international system increasingly looks less multipolar than bipolar,” Tan said.

Tan, a senior columnist at Singapore’s The Straits Times and a former Beijing bureau chief, said that view was shared at a future-China forum held in the city-state late last month.

She said that Xi and Trump agreed at their Beijing summit in May to build a constructive relationship of strategic stability. In Washington, Xi explicitly called for turning that vision  into reality.

He called for regular military dialogue and stronger arrangements for crisis communication and prevention. They agreed to continue talking about AI and the economic teams seemed to be settling into a pattern of continuous communication.

“This is not rapprochement,” Tan said. “The two countries remain locked in disputes over trade, technology, Taiwan and other issues. It looks more like an attempt to establish some rules for a rivalry that neither side expects to end.”

Eminent historian Wang Gungwu said at the forum stability might be hard to achieve. Tan quoted him as saying nation-states focused on protecting their own interests. Neither China nor the US was trying hard enough to understand the other country.

“When national interests are in conflict, you really are in difficulty,” Wang said.

An analysis in India’s The Statesman newspaper said the Washington summit highlighted an important distinction in great-power diplomacy: reducing tension was not the same as resolving conflict.

Washington and Beijing had created some breathing space but the fundamental contest  between them continued.

“The significance lies less in what has been settled than in what has been prevented,” the Oped said. “For now, neither side appears willing to return to an uncontrolled escalation that could damage both economies.”

World War II ended more than eight decades ago but wartime narratives are still being used in the international power politics of 2026.

Indian foreign policy guru C Raja Mohan says references to history are rarely innocent. “The past is interpreted and re-interpreted to serve the policies of the present,” he says.

Since returning to power, Trump has invoked wartime co-operation with both Russia and China – seen as a way, Mohan says, to justify his leader-level outreach to both Vladimir Putin and Xi.

Mohan, an international affairs academic and contributing editor to The Indian Express newspaper, says in a column that for Putin memories of victory back up Russia’s claim to a leading role in European security, while for Xi presenting China as a victor of 1945 strengthens Beijing’s efforts to undermine the 'San Francisco System' of US alliances that have maintained Asia’s post-war order.

Trump and Xi both spoke of the wartime pact during last month’s Washington summit. Trump said: “Throughout history, the pursuit of … common interests has connected our people across vast oceans, those big, tremendous distances and many differences, and even made us allies in World War II.”

The US-China alliance is a historical fact but Mohan adds a qualification – that Washington’s ally was the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and its successor government continues in Taiwan. This distinction is at the heart of Taipei’s attitude, as it accuses Beijing of using narrative diplomacy to belittle Taiwan’s historical identity.

Tokyo’s response to the Xi-Trump exchange on the alliance was deep political unease. Imperial Japan was the wartime enemy; Tokyo is now Washington’s main Asian ally.

“Recalling China and America as victorious partners, with Japan as the defeated aggressor, gives Beijing the political ammunition to challenge Tokyo’s present defence policies,” Mohan says.

“The irony is not difficult to miss. Japan is ramping up its defence spending to cope with the massive military imbalance with China and Beijing’s assertive policies on territorial disputes with Tokyo. In Beijing’s narrative, Japan is turning to militarism. For Beijing, a Japan that does not defer to China is a warmonger.”

A commentary in Nikkei Asia, the online business and politics news magazine, says Trump’s reference to China as a World War II ally was Xi’s biggest achievement at their summit.

Katsuji Nakazawa, a senior staff writer and former China bureau chief, says Trump’s remarks raised concerns in Japan and many suspected Chinese Japan-bashing was behind it.

But the true target of China’s history war, he says, is the US.

China’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, he says, rests on the belief that when the People’s Republic of China was founded it inherited China’s history.

“China is interpreting Trump’s ‘ally’ remark as clearly acknowledging that the People’s Republic of China, under the rule of the Communist Party, inherited the whole of Chinese history,” Nakazawa says… “China now thinks Trump has reaffirmed the historically continuous ‘one China’ and it is therefore natural to oppose the independence of Taiwan.”

Successive US administrations have said they ‘do not support’ Taiwan’s independence. But Xi wants the US to ‘oppose’ independence.

“Consider Trump’s ally remark as a first step towards securing the US president’s commitment to ‘oppose’ Taiwan independence,” he says.

Malaysia this week deported 1,476 Myanmar-national immigration detainees, in the first phase of a plan, agreed with Myanmar, to return as many as 5,000 people.

The deportations went ahead in defiance of the UN and human rights groups that had raised concerns about their safety, Nikkei Asia said.

UNHCR, the refugee agency, said the civil war in Myanmar did not support the safe and sustainable return of refugees.

 About 193,000 refugees from Myanmar were living in Malaysia and about two-thirds were Rohingya Muslims, the news site said. It said a wave of hate speech and misinformation had led to greater harassment of the Rohingya community, including school closures.

Public perception in Malaysia of refugees, particularly the Rohingya, had grown increasingly hostile, fuelled by economic anxieties and targetted online hate campaigns, said a report in The Straits Times.

“On social media platforms, derogatory terms, including a slur that compares the community to large municipal waste bins, are frequently used to dehumanise the population,” the story said.

It quoted Rohingya community leader Rahman Shah as saying enforcement pressures were pushing refugees to the brink of survival.

Frontier Myanmar, a Burmese exile news site, said UN human rights chief Volker Turk had called on Malaysia to stop the process immediately.

“This is no time to return anyone forcibly to a country plagued by egregious human rights violations and abuses and where many cruelly face the risk of more of the same violence on their return,” he said.

Malaysia’s Home Ministry said the returns were voluntary, the New Straits Times reported. The deportations were being carried out in phases to allow for identity verification and logistics co-ordination, the ministry said. Dates and numbers for the next phases had yet to be decided.

Jessica and Iris are young, highly educated Chinese women whose passage into adulthood runs into a problem the government is desperate to solve: faced with an ageing population and low fertility rates, the state has increasingly stressed marriage and childbearing as social priorities.

Yet decades of modernisation have given women access to better education, higher incomes and greater mobility. Women like Jessica and Iris have reasons and means to delay or reconsider marriage and motherhood.

They have found different ways of tackling family and social pressures to marry and have children. A feature in The Diplomat, an Asia-Pacific current affairs magazine, tells their stories: Jessica confronts the tensions directly, asking her own mother if marriage has given her what she expected; Iris has put distance between herself and those who want her to follow the traditional path – by moving to Hawai’i.

“Neither is rejecting family, marriage or children outright,” says the article, written by Lina Ma, a Chinese journalist living in New York. “Both are refusing to treat any of these options as the default for a Chinese woman.”

Ma says research on Chinese education, carried out by Jiwei Chen and Jiangying Guo of Nanjing Agricultural University, found that increased education could delay marriage and childbirth (and reduce fertility), partly by raising the opportunity costs of rearing children.
“The modernisation that expanded women’s choices has made the traditional sequence of adulthood – marry, have children, settle near family – less inevitable,” she says.

Jessica, the story says, watched women of her mother’s generation take on the burden of family life, shaping their careers around husbands and children. “That came to a head at a family dinner, when marriage came up again,” the story says. “Jessica turned the question back on her mother: was she actually happy in her marriage? What had it given her?”

Jessica says: “If my pain can never be carried by anyone else, then my happiness has to be mine to build, too.”

In China, settling down is hard to separate from marriage. Distance, Iris found, gave her room to answer questions about her future according to her own schedule.

“In China, there is a pervasive pressure on women in their 20s to quickly find stability, buy an apartment and marry,” Iris says. “In Hawai’i, that marital clock simply vanishes.”

Ma says neither woman knows what she will ultimately decide. “But the fact that they see marriage and motherhood as a choice at all – something that can be embraced or refused – is already a small revolution,” she says.

David Armstrong has worked in Asia for more than 20 years. He is a former chief editor of The Bulletin, the Canberra Times, The Australian and the South China Morning Post. He is a former president of the Bangkok Post company and lives in Bangkok.