Posts tagged ‘Soviet Union’

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01/07/2015

China’s Communist Party: Still Big, and Getting Bigger – China Real Time Report – WSJ

Quality over quantity. Less is more.

Those have been the watchwords of the Chinese Communist Party ever since its top leaders declared in early 2013 that its membership would be controlled in a bid to improve the organization’s “vigor and vitality.”

Two years later, the upper echelons of Chinese leadership appear to have come face to face with a realization that’s true all the world over: slimming down is hard to do.

In a communique released Tuesday, the Organization Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee said that the party boasted 87.793 million members as of the end of 2014. The figure – which exceeds the entire population of Germany – represents a net increase of 1.1 million from a year earlier.

China is in the midst of a sweeping anti-graft campaign under President Xi Jinping, with announcements of corrupt officials’ investigation and ouster from the party a near-weekly occurrence. Along with that crackdown has come a steady stream of warnings for party members to rein in behavior ranging from their mahjong playing to the use of terms like “dude” or “boss” when addressing their superiors.

At its heart is the pursuit of the party’s survival. Xi and other top leaders have made a point of reminding cadres that the Chinese Communist Party must avoid the same pitfalls that brought about the demise of the former Soviet Union – particularly disloyalty to Communist ideals – with some Chinese scholars warning that the Soviet collapse came when the ranks of its Communist Party had swollen to an unwieldy 19 million, or nearly 10% of the Soviet Union’s adult population.

The membership of the Chinese Communist Party currently stands at about 7.8% of China’s adult population.

Yet despite a vow by China’s Politburo leaders to limit the party’s size and purge “unqualified members,” statistics released by the Organization Department show that membership has actually grown over each of the past four years, albeit at an increasingly slower rate.

via China’s Communist Party: Still Big, and Getting Bigger – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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28/10/2014

Putin Turns to China as Russia’s Economy Is Weakened by Sanctions – Businessweek

Defying the U.S. and Europe is forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to aid his biggest rival to the east. To avert a recession, Russia is turning to China for investment, granting it once restricted access to raw materials and advanced weapons, say two people involved in planning Kremlin policy who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Russia’s growing dependence on China, with which it spent decades battling for control over global communism, may end up strengthening its neighbor’s position in the Pacific. With the ruble near a record low and foreign investment disappearing, luring Chinese cash also may deepen Russia’s reliance on natural resources and derail efforts to diversify the economy.

“Now that Putin has turned away from the West and toward the East, China is drawing maximum profit from Russian necessity,” says Masha Lipman, an independent political analyst in Moscow who co-authored a study on Putin with former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul. China is wasting no time filling the void created by the closing of U.S. and European debt markets to Russia’s largest borrowers. A delegation led by Premier Li Keqiang signed a package of deals on Oct. 13 in Moscow. Among them were an agreement to swap $25 billion in Chinese yuan for Russian rubles over three years, a treaty to protect companies operating in Russia and China from having their profits taxed twice, and cooperation on satellite-navigation systems and high-speed rail. To promote trade, Export-Import Bank of China agreed to provide credit lines to state-owned VTB Group and Vnesheconombank, Russia’s development bank, as well as a trade finance deal with Russian Agricultural Bank.

Russia’s economy is more vulnerable than it’s been since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unlike then, Russians are united in support of their leader, and with $455 billion in foreign currency and gold reserves, the country isn’t broke, according to Lipman. “The economy was much worse then, but Russia was in a much better position geopolitically because it had the support of the U.S. and Europe,” she says. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t respond to requests for comment.

via Putin Turns to China as Russia’s Economy Is Weakened by Sanctions – Businessweek.

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18/08/2014

Modi Sends India’s Soviet-Inspired Planning Commission Packing – India Real Time – WSJ

India’s prime minister used his inaugural Independence Day speech last Friday to cut off an arm of the country’s government that dates back nearly all the way to independence: the powerful, unloved and sometimes irrelevant-seeming Planning Commission.

The body was the creation of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who took from the experience of Japan and the Soviet Union the lesson that late-industrializing countries needed to use state intervention to transform their economies from the “commanding heights.” In the words of the 1950 cabinet resolution that created the commission: “The need for comprehensive planning based on a careful appraisal of resources and on an objective analysis of all the relevant economic factors has become imperative.”

Narendra Modi said on Friday that India could do better. The new prime minister said circumstances had changed since the commission’s creation. He said the federal government wasn’t the only driver of economic growth, and that state governments needed to be empowered to innovate. He promised the creation of a new institution that would serve as a platform for exchanging economic-policy ideas within government.

The announcement wasn’t unforeseen. The prime minister serves ex officio as the Planning Commission’s chairman. But Mr. Modi had spent his first months in office leaving the commission’s other full-time seats conspicuously unfilled. As a former chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, Mr. Modi was said at the time of his election this spring to have a strong interest in giving state governments more space to set budget priorities.

Killing the Planning Commission won’t entirely decentralize government spending in India. Federal tax revenue, according to the country’s constitution, is first distributed between the central and state governments by the Finance Commission. The Planning Commission then allocates spending to states along lines laid out in its Five-Year Plan for the economy.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, at least. Critics have accused the Planning Commission of gradually usurping the Finance Commission’s role as chief arbiter between the federal and state governments, all in the service of Five-Year Plans that are meticulously crafted but rarely achieved. The current plan, which covers 2012 to 2017, runs to three volumes and more than 1,000 pages. It covers all and sundry from boosting the manufacturing sector and increasing female literacy to promoting sports medicine and modernizing the powerloom sector.

The Five-Year Plans pervade policy making in India, at least in name if not always in effect. All federal expenditure is classified as either “plan” or “non-plan,” depending on whether it is undertaken in pursuit of the current Five-Year Plan. The Planning Commission occupies a monolithic grayish structure in New Delhi—Yojana Bhawan, or “Planning House”—just down the road from Parliament.

via Modi Sends India’s Soviet-Inspired Planning Commission Packing – India Real Time – WSJ.

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25/05/2014

China and Russia: Best frenemies | The Economist

ON MAY 21st, after a nail-biting session of late-night brinkmanship, China and Russia signed an enormous gas deal worth, at a guess, around $400 billion. Their agreement calls for Russia’s government-controlled Gazprom to supply state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation with up to 38 billion cubic metres of gas a year between 2018 and 2048. The deal capped a two-day visit to China by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that included a regional-security summit and joint military exercises off the Chinese coast.

Mr Putin called the deal the biggest in the history of Russia’s gas industry. But it counts, too, for the geopolitics that underpin it. That an agreement should come now, after a decade of haggling, is no accident. The deal will help the Kremlin reduce Russia’s reliance on gas exports to Europe. It is proof that Mr Putin has allies when he seeks to blunt Western sanctions over Ukraine. Both Russia and China want to assert themselves as regional powers. Both have increasingly strained relations with America, which they accuse of holding them back. Just over 40 years ago Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger persuaded China to turn against the Soviet Union and ally with America. Does today’s collaboration between Russia and China amount to a renewal of the alliance against America?

That is surely the impression Mr Putin wants to create. Ahead of his visit he gushed to Chinese media, saying their country was “Russia’s reliable friend”. Co-operation, he said, is at its “highest level in all its centuries-long history”. From the Chinese side, Xi Jinping chose Russia as the first country he visited on becoming president in 2013.

Commercial ties are growing. China is Russia’s largest single trading partner, with bilateral flows of $90 billion in 2013. Even before the gas deal, the two sides hoped to double that by 2020. If Western banks become more reluctant to extend new loans, financing from China could help Russia fill the gap. China badly needs the natural resources which Russia has in abundance. The gas deal will ease China’s concerns that most of its fuel supplies come through the strategic chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca, and will also enable China to move away from burning so much of the coal that pollutes the air in Chinese cities.

The two have also made common cause in geopolitics. China abstained from a UN security council vote in March that would have rejected a referendum that Russia backed in Crimea before it annexed it. China has also joined Russia in vetoing UN attempts to sanction the regime of Bashar Assad fighting a civil war in Syria. The two have taken similar stances over issues such as Iran’s nuclear programme.

China and Russia share a strong sense of their own historical greatness, now thwarted, as they see it, by American bullying. Both want the freedom to do as they please in their own back yards. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its manoeuvring in eastern Ukraine have vexed America and Europe and left Mr Putin with even fewer friends than before. China’s push into the East and South China Seas is causing similar concerns in Asia, as smaller neighbours worry about its expansionism.

But the West should not panic. Despite all this, Russia and China will struggle to overcome some fundamental differences. Start with the evidence of the gas deal itself: the fact that it took ten years to do, and that the deal was announced at the last minute, suggests how hard it was to reach agreement. The Chinese were rumoured to have driven a hard bargain, knowing that Mr Putin was desperate to have something to show from his trip.

More a grimace than a smile

In this deal, as elsewhere in the relationship, China has the upper hand. Other supplies of gas are coming online in Australia and Central Asia. And whereas China’s global power is growing, Russia is in decline—corroded by corruption and unable to diversify its economy away from natural resources. The Chinese government will expect the Kremlin to recognise this historic shift—a recipe for Chinese impatience and Russian resentment. Although the two countries are united against America, they also need it for its market and as a stabilising influence. And they are tussling for influence in Central Asia. Their vast common border is a constant source of mistrust—the Russian side sparsely populated and stuffed with commodities, the Chinese side full of people. That is why many of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons are pointed at China (see article). In the long run, Russia and China are just as likely to fall out as to form a firm alliance. That is an even more alarming prospect.

via China and Russia: Best frenemies | The Economist.

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20/12/2013

Power and patriotism: Reaching for the Moon | The Economist

IT WAS, as a Chinese newspaper put it, “a new beginning for the Chinese dream”. On December 15th the imprint left by Neil Armstrong’s boot on the moon in 1969 found its near-equivalent in the minds of China’s media commentators: the “Chinese footprint” gouged in the lunar dust by Yutu, a Chinese rover, after its mother ship made the first soft landing on the moon by a spacecraft since 1976. President Xi Jinping, watching from ground control, clapped as the image appeared on the screen. For the promoter-in-chief of the Chinese dream it was a moment to cherish.

Mr Xi launched the “Chinese dream” slogan within days of taking power in November 2012. It has since swept the nation, appearing everywhere on billboards and propaganda posters. It featured twice in a resolution adopted by the Communist Party’s Central Committee at a plenum last month that marked the tightening of Mr Xi’s grip. He has said the Chinese dream includes a “dream of a strong nation” and a “dream of a strong army” and, especially since the plenum, he has been playing up the strongman image.

Some Chinese actions in the region have appeared more assertive, too. On December 5th a Chinese naval ship had a tense encounter with an American cruiser in the South China Sea. Both sides kept quiet about it until more than a week later when American officials revealed that their vessel, USS Cowpens, had been forced to manoeuvre to avoid hitting the Chinese ship, which had passed in front.

The incident occurred while the American cruiser was watching China’s new and only aircraft-carrier, the Liaoning, as it made its first foray into the area, which is riven with competing maritime claims. (The Liaoning features in a special issue of four “Chinese dream” postage stamps issued in September; two others show Chinese spacecraft and one a deep-sea submersible.) America lodged protests with China about the near-miss in international waters. A Chinese newspaper, however, accused the Cowpens of posing a threat to “China’s national security”. The encounter is likely to add to American concerns that China is trying to claim the sea, a vital trading route, as its backyard.

The maritime near-miss came after the announcement on November 23rd of an “Air-Defence Identification Zone” in the East China Sea that would require all aircraft flying through it to report to the Chinese authorities. This enraged Japan, which controls islands within the zone, and was criticised by other countries, including America and South Korea. On December 16th during a visit to Hanoi, America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, said the zone had increased the risk of a “dangerous miscalculation or an accident”. China’s enforcement of it seems to have been scant, but nationalists at home have hailed the move. On the same day as Mr Kerry spoke, China’s defence minister, Chang Wanquan, was in Jakarta, where he said that critics of the zone were causing “a hundred harms and no benefits”.

“Chinese dream” rhetoric has suffused China’s coverage of the moon landing by the Chang’e-3 spaceship, and the Yutu (Jade Rabbit) rover’s successful deployment from it, sporting the Chinese flag on its side. In a televised call to three Chinese astronauts orbiting Earth in June, Mr Xi had said: “The space dream is an important part of the dream of a strong nation.” Despite some mutterings on Chinese microblogs about the pointlessness of replicating feats performed so long ago by the Soviet Union and America, Mr Xi appears as fixated on the moon as his predecessors were. The army’s main mouthpiece, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, said it was hard to say exactly when a Chinese person would land on the moon, but that Chinese spacemen were “heading towards this goal with unprecedented speed”.

via Power and patriotism: Reaching for the Moon | The Economist.

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27/09/2013

China in space: How long a reach?

The Economist: “THE Soviet Union in 1961. The United States in 1962. China in 2003. It took a long time for a taikonaut to join the list of cosmonauts and astronauts who have gone into orbit around Earth and (in a few cases) ventured beyond that, to the Moon. But China has now arrived as a space power, and one mark of this has been the International Astronautical Federation’s decision to hold its 64th congress in Beijing.

The congress, which is attended by representatives of all the world’s space agencies, from America and Russia to Nigeria and Syria, is a place where eager boffins can discuss everything from the latest in rocket design and the effects of microgravity on the thyroid to how best an asteroid might be mined and how to weld metal for fuel tanks.

All useful stuff, of course. But space travel has never been just about the science. It is also an arm of diplomacy, and so the congress serves too as a place where officials can exchange gossip and announce their plans.

And that was just what Ma Xingrui, the head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and thus, in effect, the congress’s host, did. He confirmed that an unmanned lunar mission, Chang’e 3, will be launched in the first half of December. This means, if all goes well, that before the year is out a Chinese rover will roam the surface of the Moon. It will collect and analyse samples of lunar regolith (the crushed rock on the Moon’s surface that passes for soil there). It will make some ultraviolet observations of stars. And it will serve to remind the world that China intends—or at least says it intends—to send people to the Moon sometime soon as well.

Mr Ma also confirmed that China plans to build a permanent space station by 2020. Such manned stations are expensive and scientifically useless, as the example of the largely American International Space Station (ISS), currently in orbit, eloquently demonstrates. But they do have diplomatic uses, and that was why Mr Ma reiterated in his speech that foreign guests will be welcome on board his station—in contradistinction to the ISS’s rather pointed ban on taikonauts—though any visitors will first have to learn Chinese. What he did not do, though, was comment on the aspect of China’s space programme that most concerns outsiders, namely exactly how militarised it is.”

via China in space: How long a reach? | The Economist.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/prognosis/how-well-will-china-and-india-innovate/

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22/09/2013

Ukraine to become China’s largest overseas farmer in 3m hectare deal

SCMP: “China will plough billions of yuan into farmland in Ukraine that will eventually become its biggest overseas agricultural project.

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The move is a significant step in China’s recent efforts to encourage domestic companies to farm overseas as China’s food demand grows in pace with urbanisation.

Under the 50-year plan, Ukraine will initially provide China with at least 100,000 hectares – an area almost the size of Hong Kong – of high-quality farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, mainly for growing crops and raising pigs.

The produce will be sold to two Chinese state-owned grain conglomerates at preferential prices. The project will eventually expand to three million hectares.

Ding Li, a senior researcher in agriculture at Anbound Consulting in Beijing, said the deal was a big move for China compared with earlier overseas agriculture.

In April 2009, China had slightly over two million hectares of farmland abroad, he said. “So three million hectares would mean a very big project.”

The agreement was signed in June between the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and KSG Agro, Ukraine’s leading agricultural company, XPCC said in a statement.

XPCC, also known as Bingtuan, is a quasi-military organisation established in Xinjiang in the 1950s to reclaim farmland and consolidate defences against the Soviet Union, whose “granary” at that time was, ironically, the Ukraine.

The statement did not reveal the value of the investment, but the Kyiv Post reported last month that it would be more than US$2.6 billion. The newspaper called it an “unprecedented foreign investment” in Ukraine’s agriculture sector.

This would make it China’s biggest reported lease or purchase of farmland overseas. The Beidahuang Group, China’s largest agribusiness, based in Heilongjiang province, and the Chongqing Grain Group have made similar moves to expand abroad.

The farming project was an important part of China’s food security programme and a response to the central government’s strategy of outsourcing the production of food to farms overseas, the statement said.

It would also help the XPCC expand, and provide jobs abroad for Chinese labourers and boost their incomes, it said.

China has made substantial agricultural investments elsewhere, notably in South America. Beidahuang acquired 234,000 hectares to grow soya bean and corn in Argentina, while Chongqing Grain paid US$375 million for soya bean plantations in Brazil and US$1.2 billion for land in Argentina to grow soya beans, corn and cotton.”

via Ukraine to become China’s largest overseas farmer in 3m hectare deal | South China Morning Post.

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07/12/2012

* PLA signs preliminary deal for 24 Russian Su-35 jet fighters

Rare admission that China’s technology may not be up to it.

South China Morning Post: “A preliminary deal for the sale of 24 advanced Russian Su-35 jet fighters to the People’s Liberation Army indicates the technological hurdles China faces in developing its own J-20, especially in terms of engine technology, military analysts say.

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Mainland and Russian media reported last month that Beijing might purchase 24 Su-35s, an updated version of the fourth generation Su-27, for US$1.5 billion. The deal was first proposed by Moscow two years ago.

Beijing expressed interest in purchasing only four Su-35s last year, but that was rejected by Moscow, which had originally expected China to buy 48 planes, Moscow’s Vedomosti business daily quoted an official from Russia’s Federal Service for Military and Technical Co-operation as saying.

It also quoted Igor Korotchenko, head of the Russian Defence Ministry’s public council, as saying Moscow also asked Beijing to sign an agreement not to make copies of the Su-35.

A Beijing-based PLA senior colonel, who requested anonymity, said: “We decided to buy the Su-35 because it’s a fact that our home-made engines have failed to measure up to the Russian products.”

He said China was still playing catch-up, despite recent headlines hailing its progress on military modernisation.

“Engines have been the biggest headache and we are still trying to cope with it,” he said. “The purchase of the Su-35s might help our J-20 project, but there are too many deeper problems hiding in our military industrial system that are hindering our research and development.””

via PLA signs preliminary deal for 24 Russian Su-35 jet fighters | South China Morning Post.

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12/11/2012

* New Chinese leaders in transition

This is a most insightful article about the new cohort of Chinese leaders. Unlike any other country where national leaders come from all ages and backgrounds, the new Chinese leadership share more in common between them than there are differences. It will give our readers a better understanding of what is about to come once the leadership transition is complete next Spring.

Xinhua: “More than 2,200 delegates to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) began on Sunday to deliberate a proposed name-list of nominees for the candidates for the Party’s new leadership.

 

Within days, they will elect members and alternate members of the 18th CPC Central Committee, the leading body of the world’s largest ruling party.

China’s leadership transition, which began last year from township level, will surely determine the future of the world’s second largest economy, and influence the world.

A new standing committee of the CPC Beijing municipal committee was elected on July 3, marking the completion of the leadership change at the provincial level.

Since the beginning of the year, main leaders of some central departments and centrally-administered enterprises have been replaced. The seventh plenum of the 17th CPC Central Committee early this month appointed two vice chairmen of the CPC Central Military Commission.

The local leadership transition and central-level reshuffle are preparations for the leadership transition at the 18th Party congress, Dai Yanjun, a scholar on Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said.

From central to local levels, the new army of CPC officials bear the distinctive characteristics and personal styles and they are to lead China’s new round of reform and development, said Dai.

GROWING UP UNDER RED FLAG

Among the delegates to the 18th Party congress, a number of CPC officials born in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, were under the spotlight.

Dai said they grew up in a totally different historic and social environment from their predecessors, which will, to a great extent, lead to a different administration concept and approach.

Unlike the founding fathers of the People’s Republic of China and previous generations of leading officials who grew up in wartime, the new leadership, mostly born around the founding of New China, grew up in peacetime.

This allowed them to have a complete and systematic education of the mainstream socialist ideology, and shaped their worldview and value orientation.

In their youth, they underwent severe tests during the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and “three years of natural disasters” (1959-1961). The turbulent Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a hard time for them. Some, in their teens, were forced to live and work in the poorest villages after their parents were persecuted.

“In short, they all went through starvation and had the experience of working hard in rural areas,” said Dai. “They are victims of the Cultural Revolution. They witnessed the ups and downs of China’s development and the success of the national rejuvenation. They are firm supporters of reform and opening up.”

The leading officials born after 1950 and with experiences as “educated youth” are an idealistic and realistic group. They are closely watched by foreigners who are looking into China’s future, said Cheng Li, director of research and a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institution.

FULL UNDERSTANDING OF NATIONAL CONDITIONS

Elites have become the backbone of the CPC and the country. The people elected into the top leadership at the 18th Party congress will showcase the Party’s governing ideals and value orientation in the future, said Dai.

A notable feature of the leading officials born after the founding of New China, no matter what families they are from, is that they all have grassroots working experiences. They had worked with ordinary farmers, workers and soldiers, and been promoted step by step.

Such experiences are valuable, said Dai. This gives them a full understanding of the society and country, so that they will address state issues from the viewpoint of common people and focus more on improving people’s livelihood.

Chinese leader Hu Jintao said, at the 90th founding anniversary of the CPC last year, that alienation from the people poses the greatest risk to the Party after it has gained political power.

At the ongoing Party congress, Hu stressed efforts to “put people first, exercise governance for the people and always maintain close ties with them.”

China is undergoing rapid social transformation and many thorny problems emerged first at grassroots levels.

The leading officials were working at grassroots levels when China launched the reform and opening-up drive and profound changes took place in social interests and structure, Dai said.

They met with and handled quite a lot of new problems, Dai said. “Such working experiences enable them to know what the people need most. This is an ability that cannot be learned from books and also their big advantage.”

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND AND INTERNATIONAL VISION

Another feature of the leading officials is that they have abundant learning experiences and a sound professional background.

Many of them went to the best colleges in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and some others took in-service educational programs and managed to acquire master and doctorate degrees. Well-educated officials are nowadays common in central and local authorities.

With the academic degrees and professional background, they meet better the requirements of the current economic and social development, Dai said.

A feature of their academic backgrounds is that more people studied humanities and social science, and some of them majored in political science, law and management, giving them confidence in pushing forward reform in all respects, Cheng Li said.

Unlike the previous generations who studied in the Soviet Union, many of the leading officials were sent or chose to study in the United States and developed European countries, gaining a broad international vision.

Xie Chuntao, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said that the leading officials are not rigid or conservative, and they will guarantee the adherence to reform and opening up and the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

“They participated in, witnessed and benefitted from reform and opening up, and know what was it like before, so none of them will look back,” said Xie.

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10/10/2012

* Russia further delays delivery of Admiral Gorshkov to India

It would seem a mini-arms race is on between India and China.  Although India already has two aircraft carriers, one is being retired and the other undergoing a five-month refit.  Fortunately, there is no known marine based territorial dispute between India and China, Curiously, India has been getting its carriers from Russia’s obsolete fleet and China from Ukraine’s retired fleet!

Times of India: “Russia delayed delivery of a trouble-plagued aircraft carrier for at least a year on Friday, a blow to India’s efforts to quickly build up naval strength as increasingly assertive Asian rival China expands its maritime reach.

INS Vikramaditya is anchored at Sevmash factory in northern city of Severodvinsk

Originally built as the Admiral Gorshkov in the Soviet Union, the $2.3 billion aircraft carrier is being reconditioned and was due to be ready this year, but problems with the ship’s boilers have pushed the delivery date back several times.

“We believe the handover of the ship will take place in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Russian defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov said at a joint news conference with his Indian counterpart in New Delhi.

Defence minister AK Antony said he had conveyed “serious concern” at the delays to Serdyukov.

The bilateral meeting precedes a visit by Russian President Putin to New Delhi on November 1.

The ship is to be renamed as Vikramaditya and the success of the order is seen as an important test of defence ties between Russia, the world’s second-largest arms exporter, and its biggest customer.

India, a big buyer of Soviet Union weaponry, still relies on Russia for 60 percent of its arms purchases, but has diversified its suppliers in recent years. Israel is now the No. 2 seller, and countries like the United States and France also increasing their presence.

“I myself expressed serious concern about the delay,” Antony said, adding that the issue had been raised several times. He said he was putting pressure on both sides to finish work on the biolers as soon as possible, but said he had not discussed penalising Russia so far.

India is closely watching the Chinese navy’s newly assertive stance in the South China Sea and in a dispute with Japan over contested islands that have raised tensions in East Asia this year.

India bought its first, British-built aircraft carrier in the 1960s, which was decommissioned in 1997. Another ex-British carrier, the INS Viraat, is in operation but is reaching the end of its useful service.”

via Russia further delays delivery of Admiral Gorshkov to India – The Times of India.

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