Great to see an Indian perspective on China issue.

An India/Australia alliance makes sense. There are no problems with China's sovereignty, but China has illegally claimed sovereignty over the South China Sea, and that is a problem, as is its constant threat to the Indian Ocean and to its neighbour and our fellow Commonwealth partner, India. We should all be making much more of the Commonwealth against the China threat.

On military aggression, I have read an article (the details of which have since dimmed) suggesting that the PLA isn't worth a cracker because it is manned by wusses of the one child policy; the children having been treated like "little emperors" by parents and grandparents and spoilt to the point of uselessness. India is more than capable of dealing with China in the military area.

The war that China is good at is the one that it has been engaged in for a long time against the rest of the world: the psychological, technological cold that the Western politicians haven't yet recognised as war.

Oops. I just remembered also reading that the Australian military geniuses have admitted to favour recruiting girls over men into the infantry. So, we might well need India as well as the US to help us out if ever there is a shooting war. Can you imagine Scott Morrison, with the help of ladies, running a war?

China is rapidly becoming the largest economic and military power in the world! And taking what she wants in small bites from isolated states, none of who have, as single states, any inclination to stand up to the bully on the block!

And democracies can be broken from within, by folk who constantly condemn or criticize!

India needs new partners and alliances/trading partners/trade deals.

To ensure there's too much commercial interest to lose, for other major powers/corporations.

And we should for our part retrospectively reverse particular foreign investments which are not in the interest of our own security!

A Darwin port anyone?
Alan B.

The last thing we need in the Indo-Pacific region is a NATO-type alliance whose sole aim is to bully China into a corner just as the US-led NATO has done to Russia.
And yes, I'm sure we'd all agree that 'Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you' is indeed a good yardstick for all countries to live by. So why has the US used NATO to surround Russia with military bases? And why has it likewise surrounded China with its threatening military might? We all know it wouldn't tolerate a skerrick of this aggression being applied to its own borders.
What gives the US the right to expect China and Russia to heel to its demands, while it bullies, invades and plunders whatever country it chooses to? China and Russia are increasingly making it clear that they will no longer tolerate these double standards. And many around the world are welcoming their tempering of American hegemony.

Bully China into a corner. Get real, Bronwyn. What are you: the Chinese ambassador in drag?

Bronwyn, please give examples of those welcoming declining US hegemony.

Always looks better with evidence.

India is not necessarily Australia's friend. Many nuclear-armed Indian nationalists see Australia as Britain's and then America's white racial lackey - all part of centuries of "cruel domination of India".

Useful to look at China's point of view:

"A meeting between Chinese and Indian military officials, led by top tactical army commanders, according to Indian media, is scheduled on Saturday. The meeting between the top echelons injects hopes to ease the ongoing border tensions that have been dominating the spotlight.

Indian news portal ThePrint.in, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that the 14 Corps Commander Lieutenant General Harinder Singh and China's Southern Xinjiang Military District chief will attend the meeting.

There are no further updates on the details concerning the meeting, as of press time.

However, ahead of Saturday's scheduled meeting between the military officials, near the site of their border stand-off, India's ministry of external affairs issued a statement on Friday, stressing diplomatic channels as a way to peacefully resolve the border tension in the Ladakh region.

Citing the statement in a late Friday report, the Reuters revealed that senior officials of the two counties held a video conference and reached agreements that two sides should handle their differences through peaceful discussion and not allow the differences degrade into disputes.

Chinese analysts reached by the Global Times on Saturday echoed similar views, agreeing that the peaceful discussion through the diplomatic channel is the only effective way to resolve the problems.

However, Chinese analysts also emphasized that the Indian side should immediately stop provocative acts along the border and respect China's bottom line stance on the common border, otherwise deadlock will not be truly resolved.

They also cautioned that the seemingly friendly rhetoric the Indian side deliberately revealed to the Western media could also serve as a pressure tactic against China, aiming to silence China's reasonable proposition on the pretext of peaceful resolution."

more see http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1190725.shtml of 6 June 2020.

Massing your military on a border is standard practice as a prelude to a land or territory grab.

India needs to fight fire with fire and employ the same massive build up along a now contested Indian border.

And would do well to seek alliances with other democracies particularly those who will be next in the crosshairs!

And we for our part need to buy some off the shelf, nuclear powered, nuclear-armed submarines. At least three!

And revisit the sale of the Darwin port with a retrospective refusal!
And then get cracking with rebuilding a robust manufacturing sector, while we still may!

All of which will piss off our would-be masters, as they are already seeing Australia as their most southern state and their most resource-rich one into the bargain.
Alan B.

ttbn - China is ringed by hundreds of US military bases ... stretching from northern Australia, up through the Pacific and across eastern and central Asia. This is a deliberate military encirclement created with the sole intent of containing China. Hence my reference to bullying China into a corner. Not at all an unrealistic assessment ... and certainly not deserving of the puerile ambassador-in-drag reference ... you're the one who needs to get real!

Yes we definitely need a few nuclear powered & nuclear armed subs, but a hundred nuclear armed cruise missiles, & 50 or so nuclear armed ICBMs would be a minimum necessary to make us an expensive enough target for us to be left alone.

Take the US & the UK out of NATO, & the Europeans would not be capable of invading Fiji, let alone threaten China.

I wouldn't trust America, they are useless decaying goners already: while they like talking and bragging, just a little Pearl-Harbor-like "foo" by China and they will all flee and scramble back to their own land with their tail between their legs. Yet we have nowhere else to go, so everyone in the Asia-Pacific must unite against the Chinese threat. This regional alliance is very welcome and yes, Hasbeen, we need our own nuclear weapons to survive, also biological weapons on the scale of COVID-19, Ebola and beyond.

I wish India can reach a settlement with Pakistan over Kashmir: their ongoing dispute which pushes Pakistan towards China is very unhelpful. Pakistan too should be part of our alliance to defend ourselves against the ruthless Chinese enemy.

We will probably never find out whether COVID-19 was an accident or the first shot in WW-III, but clearly the CCP would not hesitate using such a weapon if indeed they had it - we too must have a biological second-strike capability!

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Dear Ttbn,

«There are no problems with China's sovereignty...»

What about Tibet?! I hope your statement was just a case of memory-failure, rather than of acceptance of evil.