This chapter relates the legendary origins of the modern East Asian nations, and the importance of those legends to modern national identities. It then reconstructs the somewhat different story of the origins of Bronze Age civilization in East Asia based on the archeological evidence, starting in the Central Plain of what is today north China. As a fundamental feature, the languages of East Asia are discussed. This chapter argues that it was widespread shared regional use of the largely non-phonetic Chinese written characters, despite great linguistic diversity, that gave East Asia much of its cultural coherence and distinctiveness, as well as much shared vocabulary.

Much of the foreign investment that has fueled China’s post-reform economic boom has come from overseas Chinese people, with Hong Kong serving as China’s largest single source of foreign direct investment. In addition, there is extensive sharing of popular culture throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Hong Kong, a British colony since 1842, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under the formula “one country, two systems” – supposedly allowing Hong Kong a continued degree of autonomy. But a controversial extradition agreement in 2019 sparked mass protests, which Beijing reacted to in 2020 by imposing a new National Security Law that brought Hong Kong more firmly under control. Taiwan, meanwhile, became the last refuge for the Chinese Nationalist Party after it lost the Civil War to the Communists in 1949. In the 1980s–1990s, opposition political parties were legalized, and Taiwan evolved into a genuine multiparty democracy. Because Beijing insists that Taiwan is a renegade province that must be recovered eventually, and because Taiwan is a flourishing democracy that now produces more than 60 percent of all the world’s computer chips, Taiwan is a place of great global strategic concern.

In September 2016, around 2,000 farmers led by the Bhal Bachao Samiti (Protect Bhal Committee, henceforth BBS) and Sagar Rabari from Gujarat Khedut Samaj (Gujarat Farmers’ Society) gathered in front of Hotel Vision Modi, the local office of the DSIRDA. Many of these farmers were recently served notices to vacate their land for the project. Farmers were particularly angry because, in December 2015, they managed to get an order from the Gujarat High Court which directed the DSIRDA to maintain the status quo and not acquire any land from farmers until the matter was duly heard (Express News Network, 2015). However, ignoring the court order, DSIRDA kept sending these notices.

As farmer leaders were negotiating with DSIRDA officials, the crowd outside grew restless. Some women farmers forced their way into the office, and the rest of the crowd followed. Once the women were inside, the matter suddenly snowballed into a commotion as the crowd broke down furniture, tore maps hung on the walls and threw away official files. It continued for almost an hour as nobody seemed to be able to control the situation. The officials then offered to negotiate farmers’ demands, including an immediate stop to notices. Other demands such as shutting down the local DSIRDA office were to be taken up with senior officials in Gandhinagar. However, none of these promises were delivered.

Before this incident, another huge protest meeting was organised in Dholera in 2015, under the banner of Koli Samaj (Koli Society). Although close to 10,000 women and men attended, it did not yield much beyond the show of strength (Top right in Figure 7.1). In fact, a few months after the Koli Samaj meeting, when the BBS farmers planned a padayatra (march on foot) rally from Dholera to Gandhinagar, only a few participated. It later transpired that many of the farmer leaders were persuaded by individual caste leaders (both Koli and Darbar) to skip the event. In July 2017, the Activation Area in the SIR project was in full swing with farmers regularly served notices to vacate their farmlands. According to a DSIRDA bureaucrat, many farmers ‘voluntarily’ accepted compensation.

M. Vijayanunni, the former census commissioner, continued to speak out publicly against the combined caste-wise enumeration and BPL survey just before the project began in late July 2011. His prescient comments outlined the legal distinction between the decennial census and the BPL survey, related operational differences, and the shortcomings of the revised survey instrument. Vijayanunni pointed out that the SEC survey remained a project designed to identify those households living below the poverty line and differentiate among households that faced different degrees of food insecurity, housing insecurity, and poverty. While the project sought to pinpoint households above the poverty line, it did not seek to distinguish within this broad grouping. Detailing the socioeconomic profiles of comparatively privileged households fell outside the scope of the BPL identification. As such, degrees of privilege remained comparatively masked by the survey instrument. The survey did not seek to generate “a caste-wise socio-economic profile of the population of India” as required for the implementation of reservation benefits and related legal cases. Vijayanunni argued that inserting a caste question into a survey whose purpose was to identify poor households could not generate a comprehensive caste-wise socioeconomic profile of the country, nor a more detailed understanding of caste-based power.

By unpacking the two pillars of international order – the power pillar and the institutional pillar – this chapter examines why Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” argument is misleading in analyzing international order transition. We argue that a mere power shift between the United States and China does not necessarily indicate an order transition; fundamental changes in both the power and institutional pillars are necessary conditions for the international order transition. While the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD) prevents direct military conflicts between the US and China, it is undeniable that intense strategic competition has become an inescapable reality between the two nations. Subsequently, we outline the two research questions guiding this project: (1) How do the United States and China compete with one another through international institutions? and (2) What are the implications of their institutional balancing for the ongoing process and outcome of international order transition?

The book started with a quote by a local farmer, ‘Development neither reaches us nor leaves us. It's an illusion’, where he argued that the many versions of development which Dholera has been promised since the 1960s have been contradictory to the needs and wants of the local population. While some of the development projects such as the Narmada canal still remain the demand of the locals, not everyone celebrates the more recent avatars such as the smart city or the international airport. In fact, the farmer implied, various versions of development keep being imposed without consulting the locals or trying to understand their needs. More importantly, none of these versions has been delivered. This does not mean that Dholera is off the map of new development endeavours so much so that he terms them ‘illusions’, as the standard of living of the locals has not seen any major improvement through such projects. For him and many Dholera natives, instead of improving their living conditions or addressing inequalities, such development projects instead create scope for more politics and often threaten to dispossess them of whatever they have.

The preceding chapters discussed the implications of these endeavours through a close study of the role of the state in the development and delivery of Dholera smart city or the impact of such projects on the entity of the state. This was done after I laid out the case of Dholera and how the changing narratives of development in such a small place epitomise the journey of the Indian state when it comes to delivering development to its subjects. The choice of concepts, theories or analytical lens was, to a large extent, informed and guided by the field. The state was explored analytically while neoliberalism and Hindutva provided the context. In doing so, the book contributed to the scholarship on all three themes. The starting point of the book was the multifaceted nature and the contradictory practices of each of the themes. At the same time, the book also involved the analysis of a set of processes and phenomena such as smart urbanism, real estate and farmers’ resistance.

This chapter focuses on US-China institutional balancing within the political suborder, with a specific focus on the intricacies of the strategies employed by both nations within the framework of global human rights regimes in the United Nations (UN) system. This ideological competition becomes evident in the battle for influence in various UN human rights regimes, where both the United States and China have actively attempted to shape the discourse and policies related to human rights, democracy, and governance in alignment with their respective visions. As states grapple with these contrasting visions and carve their unique paths, a more diverse tapestry of political ideologies, governance models, and regional cooperation initiatives has emerged. This dynamic reflects the unintended positive consequences resulting from the institutional competition between the United States and China, ultimately nurturing a more complex and adaptable political landscape in the region.

We are standing in front of a three-floor apartment building in central Bengaluru. “Thirty-seven,” says Vijaya as she locates the building on the block map and shares the number from the map associated with the building. She folds the map and places it under the household listing booklet on her clipboard. Vijaya has been trained as an enumerator for the SEC survey and she and her husband, Mohan, who is the DEO, are getting ready to interview their first household of the afternoon. She opens the household listing booklet and flips through it until she reaches the three entries for building number 37. She locates the number associated with the ground floor unit and tells her husband, “148.” Mohan types the number into his handheld tablet. The tablet contains preloaded data from the NPR, a recently created government database for a system of national identification. A few seconds later the data for household 148 populates the screen. Mohan reads aloud the name of the head of household, “R.L. Suresh.” Vijaya nods to indicate that “R.L. Suresh” matches the handwritten entry for the head of household in the household listing booklet, which census enumerators created during the first round of Census 2011 two years earlier. Mohan opens the front gate, and we walk into the small compound and up to the front door of the ground-floor unit. Mohan knocks on the front door with his right hand and holds the tablet in his left hand. A few seconds later, a woman in her mid- to late thirties opens the door and looks at the three of us. Mohan holds up the handheld device as he explains that we are here “for census work.” He then asks, “Is this the house of R.L. Suresh?” The woman nods in acknowledgment. She invites us into the drawing room and asks us to sit. As we settle into chairs, she closes the front door and stands near the entrance. Her teenage son stands in a corner of the room and watches. Mohan confirms the name, sex, and age of the four household members based on preloaded NPR data.

In their 2008 article “A Sociology of Quantification,” Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens describe the immense bureaucratic effort required to quantify populations:

Chapters 3–6 trace the extensive infrastructure involved in the production of caste-wise data. In response to organizing by caste census advocates, the Congress-led government conceded to collect caste-wise data and then mobilized massive financial, human, and technological resources to do so. This infrastructure included, but was not limited to, executive bureaucrats who blocked the caste-wise enumeration in the census and pushed it into a BPL survey; MoRD administrators in Delhi who had been revamping the BPL survey for several years, who collaborated with the MoHUPA and the ORGI to coordinate and manage the combined BPL survey and caste-wise enumeration; state and local government officials that oversaw the implementation of the extensive ground operations for the survey; PSUs that managed electronic data entry operations; private firms that bid for, and secured, PSU-managed government contracts to staff and implement electronic data entry; charge centers—or the local hub for data collection operations, where data collectors uploaded interview data to a government server—and the people and technology that the staffed charge centers across the country; the government server hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that stored all collected household data; the entire training infrastructure for data collectors which prepared them to conduct household interviews; the hundreds of thousands of enumerators and DEOs who interviewed households, as well as the supervisors who monitored their work;

This chapter conducts an in-depth examination of the US-China institutional competition within the security suborder in the Asia-Pacific region. It offers a comprehensive analysis of two distinct rounds of institutional balancing between the United States and China, which involve key forums like the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD), Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), and ASEAN Defense Ministerial Meeting (ADMM)-Plus, spanning the post-Cold War era. Our argument suggests that this robust rivalry in institutional balancing between the United States and China has given rise to a dynamic security architecture within the Asia-Pacific region. Within this framework, bilateralism, minilateralism, and multilateralism coexist and intersect, resulting in a complex and nuanced security architecture.

Bhaubhai was often sarcastic while discussing the possibility of the smart city project being delivered. The fatigue around development that the comments above highlight was largely because of its non-delivery. A Congress party supporter, he was critical of the current spate of projects in Dholera, resenting the role of private corporations and land speculation which, he argued, were the reasons for the region's under-development. According to him, if the government was so keen to develop a city in Dholera, ‘it should have been modelled after Gandhinagar and not a private company-built city like in America’. A key member of Bhal Bachao Samiti, the farmers’ group protesting against the smart city project, Bhaubhai often spoke about the importance of the ‘sarkar’ in delivering development since private companies would never care about the locals. This perspective of Bhaubhai contrasts significantly with Pradeepsinh, a local BJP leader:

Appendix A: Socio-Economic Caste (SEC) Survey Questionnaire (Urban)

For Each Household

Section 1: Housing/Dwelling

• 1. Predominant material of wall of the dwelling room (s) (Give code)

  • 1 = Grass/thatch/bamboo, etc.

  • 2 = Plastic/polythene

  • 3 = Mud/unburnt brick

  • 4 = Wood

  • 5 = Stone not packed with mortar

  • 6 = Stone packed with mortar

  • 7 = G.I./metal/asbestos sheets

  • 8 = Burnt brick

  • 9 = Concrete

  • 0 = Any other

• 2. Predominant material of roof of the dwelling room (s) (Give code)

  • 1 = Grass/thatch/bamboo/wood/mud, etc.

  • 2 = Plastic/polythene

  • 3 = Hand-made tiles

  • 4 = Machine-made tile

  • 5 = Burnt brick

  • 6 = Stone

  • 7 = Slate

  • 8 = G.I./metal/asbestos sheets

  • 9 = Concrete

  • 0 = Any other

• 3. Ownership status of this house (Give code)

  • 1 = Owned

  • 2 = Rented

  • 3 = Shared

  • 4 = Living on premises with employer

  • 5 = House provided by employer

  • 6 = Any other

• 4. Number of dwelling rooms exclusively in possession of this household (Record 1,2,3…)

Section 2: Amenities

• 5. Availability of drinking water source

  • 1 = Within the premises, 2 = Near the premises, 3 = Away

• 6. Main source of lighting

  • 1 = Electricity, 2 = Kerosene, 3 = Solar, 4 = Other oil, 5 = Any other, 6 = No lighting

• 7. Water-seal latrine exclusively for the household

  • 1 = Yes, 2 = No

• 8. Wastewater outlet connected to

  • 1 = Closed drainage, 2 = Open drainage, 3 = No drainage

• 9. Separate room used as kitchen exclusively for the household

  • 1 = Yes, 2 = No

Section 3: Assets

Does the household own the following assets (Give code)

• 10. Refrigerator

  • 1 = Yes; 2 = No

• 11. Telephone/Mobile phone

  • Yes: 1 = Landline only, 2 = Mobile only, 3 = Both, 4 = No

• 12. Computer/Laptop

  • Yes: 1 = With internet, 2 = Without internet, 3 = No

• 13. Motorized wheelers

  • 1 = Two/Three-wheeler, 2 = Four-wheeler, 3 = No

• 14. AC

  • 1 = Yes; 2 = No

• 15. Washing machine

  • 1 = Yes; 2 = No

For Each Person

• 1. Serial No.