Category Archives: Asian Security

In divided Bangladesh, election delivers power, not stability

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Without order and growth, the country risks sliding into Islamist majoritarianism

Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader Tarique Rahman, left, and Jamaat-e-Islami leader Shafiqur Rahman. (Source photos by Ken Kobayashi and Reuters)
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Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

After 18 months of turmoil, lawlessness and Islamist violence, Bangladesh’s national election has produced a government with a commanding parliamentary supermajority. On paper, that should be a recipe for stability. In practice, it may instead entrench a new and potentially more dangerous form of instability.

The central question is no longer who holds power in Bangladesh, but whether the world’s most densely-populated large country can still function as an inclusive, rules-based state at all.

Bangladesh stands today at a perilous crossroads. Without political reconciliation and economic revival, it risks sliding toward the kind of Islamist dysfunction that has long plagued Pakistan, the country from which it seceded in a bloody war of liberation in 1971.

For half a century, Bangladesh’s politics has been dominated by two dynastic forces: the Awami League, established by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who was killed in a 1975 army coup, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), launched in 1978 by military ruler Ziaur Rahman, whose son Tarique Rahman now heads the new government. These parties have alternated between power and persecution, each using the state against the other.

Sheikh Hasina, Mujibur Rahman’s daughter, once symbolized democratic resilience and kept both the military and Islamist militancy in check. But her increasingly undemocratic rule triggered a violent, student-led, Islamist-backed uprising in 2024 that forced her into exile after she lost the military’s support. What followed was not a democratic transition but a dangerous vacuum.

The interim regime led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus presided over widespread repression, institutional purges and a resurgence of Islamist vigilantism. Armed mobs attacked minorities with impunity, journalists were silenced and thousands were imprisoned. Even more alarmingly, the regime rehabilitated extremist groups previously linked to terrorism, including releasing convicted terrorists, and allowed radical Islamists to enter the political mainstream.

The result is that Bangladesh now risks shifting from a secular-authoritarian order to an Islamist-majoritarian one.

Against that backdrop, this month’s election was less a democratic reset than a managed transition. The secular Awami League, historically the country’s largest political force, was arbitrarily outlawed last year and thousands of its members remain in jail without trial. As much as 30% to 40% of the electorate was effectively excluded from the election.

In that vacuum, the BNP emerged as the dominant electoral force. But it faced a new challenger in its former ally Jamaat-e-Islami, a hardline Islamist party. The election thus pitted an Islamist-leaning bloc against a coalition led by a hardline Islamist group, rather than offering a pluralistic national choice. Unsurprisingly, many Awami League supporters boycotted the vote and turnout fell sharply in minority-heavy constituencies, where intimidation and violence created a climate of fear.

The result is a 300-member parliament that may be numerically stable but socially brittle. It includes just seven women and only four members from religious and ethnic minority communities, though these groups make up about 10% of the population.

Even before the new government settles in, its legitimacy is already under challenge.

For years, the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami accused the Awami League of rigging elections. Now, with the banned Awami League gone, the accusers have turned on each other. Jamaat — once the BNP’s indispensable ally, providing street muscle — has charged the BNP with rigging the the latest election, alleging widespread ballot fraud and irregularities.

This rupture reflects a deeper contest over who represents the spirit of the 2024 uprising, which Islamist groups helped organize and sustain. If the Islamist-led opposition believes it has been cheated of its “revolution,” Bangladesh may soon see renewed unrest.

Compounding this fragility is the near collapse of judicial credibility. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has repeatedly reinterpreted the constitution to suit those in power, legitimizing coups, overturning its own precedents and even invoking a “revolutionary mandate” to justify continuance of an unelected interim regime.

In such a system, law becomes an instrument of power rather than a constraint on it. This is hardly a foundation for stability or investor confidence.

The new government, in fact, inherits an economy in distress. Growth has slowed sharply, inflation has surged, investor confidence has collapsed and foreign debt has risen. The BNP has indicated it will continue with the IMF bailout package negotiated by the interim regime, but austerity, subsidy cuts and banking reforms will impose real social costs, especially on a restless youth population.

The government must restore macroeconomic stability while delivering visible improvements in jobs and governance. Failure on either front could quickly translate into renewed street anger.

Bangladesh’s trajectory will have consequences beyond its borders. For India, instability raises immediate security concerns, including the risk of militant infiltration across a porous border. Bangladesh’s direction will also shape the regional balance between China, a major infrastructure investor, and Western partners seeking greater market access.

A parliamentary supermajority gives the BNP-led government enormous formal power. But political dominance is not legitimacy. Bangladesh’s cycles of instability have historically been driven not by weak governments but by exclusive ones — regimes that rule for one party while suppressing rival political forces. This election risks reproducing that pattern in a new ideological form.

True stability will require something Bangladesh has rarely sustained: national reconciliation. Countries emerging from deep trauma, from Rwanda to South Africa, recognized that durable peace depends on bringing former adversaries into a shared political framework. Bangladesh will need to do the same, to create a pathway for the Awami League and its supporters to reenter politics, protect minorities and dissenting voices, restore judicial independence and revive civil society.

Otherwise, the country risks replacing one form of autocracy with another: trading secular illiberalism for majoritarian Islamism, and stability for a cycle of confrontation and lawlessness.

The election has produced a government, but not a political settlement. Unless the new leadership uses its supermajority to widen inclusion, rebuild institutions and rein in extremist forces, the promise of stability and economic revival will remain elusive. The real test of this election will not be whether it delivered power, but whether it can deliver peace.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

Feb. 8 election will determine if Japan emerges as a more autonomous strategic actor

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Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

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The upcoming election is shaping up to be one of the most consequential political contests Japan has faced in decades, largely because it will determine whether Japan decisively locks in a new strategic orientation at home and abroad. The vote will effectively function as a referendum on whether Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s more assertive approach to economic security, global engagement and China receives a democratic mandate or stalls amid political fragmentation.

The election outcome will also signal whether China’s model of economic coercion is effective against a major U.S. ally. Beijing has deployed a full-spectrum pressure campaign against Takaichi’s four-month administration — punitive measures designed to hurt Japanese business interests and undermine domestic support for her government.

A Takaichi victory would represent a significant setback for China, signaling that Japanese voters are prepared to absorb real economic pain in exchange for greater strategic autonomy. Reducing exposure to Chinese economic pressure is also essential for navigating a more coercive global order, one in which U.S. President Donald Trump has shown little hesitation in pressuring even close allies.

Equally important is how the election intersects with Japan’s international role, especially in the Global South. Under Takaichi, engagement with key developing countries has become a core pillar of economic resilience. The campaign has elevated “Sanaenomics,” a strategy that emphasizes supply-chain diversification, technological co-creation and reduced dependence on China. Countries such as India, Vietnam and the Philippines are positioned not only as alternative manufacturing hubs under a “China-plus-one” strategy, but also as long-term partners in energy, AI governance and critical infrastructure.

The election thus has implications far beyond Japan. A clear mandate would accelerate Japan’s shift toward a more forward-leaning, technology-driven diplomacy, aimed at out-competing — rather than accommodating — Chinese influence. Conversely, a weaker or divided outcome would slow this transition, as Japan enters an era of fragmented, coalition-based bargaining.

In short, the vote will help determine whether Japan emerges as a more autonomous strategic actor or remains vulnerable to external pressure in an era of weaponized interdependence.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

The mother of all mega-dams is China’s hidden weapon in the Himalayas

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A fisherman sits next to his boat along the river Brahmaputra in Guwahati, India. AP Photo.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

New disclosures reveal that China’s planned super-dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo — the world’s highest-altitude major river, better known as the Brahmaputra — is not a single structure. Rather, it is a a vast, tunnel-linked hydropower and water-diversion complex, spanning roughly 150 kilometers through the Himalayas.

The project would transform an internationally shared river, originating in water-rich Tibet, into a strategic instrument of state power.

For years, China’s super-dam was discussed as a single, if colossal, piece of infrastructure. That description is now obsolete. What Beijing is constructing on the so-called “Everest of Rivers,” near Tibet’s border with India, is not just the largest dam ever attempted. It is an extensive subterranean network designed to give China effective command over the river before it reaches any downstream country.

A cascade of barrages, reservoirs and power stations — linked by giant tunnels bored through the world’s highest mountain range — will together form a titanic, integrated hydropower system.

It remains unclear whether some of the impounded water will be diverted into what Beijing calls the Great South-North Water Diversion Project. While the eastern and central routes — already operational — transfer water from China’s southern rivers to its arid north, including Beijing, the controversial western line aims to reroute waters from Tibet-originating international rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people across South and Southeast Asia.

The new project is centered near the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra, where the river makes a dramatic U-turn around a Himalayan peak before plunging toward India. Over a stretch of just 30 miles, the river drops some 6,500 feet — one of the steepest descents of any major river on Earth.

China plans to exploit this extraordinary gradient not with a single concrete wall, but by diverting the river through multiple tunnels, some extending more than 12 miles, to feed a cascade of five power stations. Their combined generating capacity is estimated at over 60 gigawatts — almost three times that of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest.

This design fundamentally alters the risk calculus for downstream states. Beijing has described the project as “run-of-the-river,” a term meant to reassure neighboring countries that water storage — and therefore Chinese control — will be limited. But the scale of tunneling and the interlinked reservoirs undermines that claim. Even without massive surface reservoirs, the ability to divert, withhold or abruptly release enormous volumes of water through subterranean channels gives China de facto control over the river’s flow just before it leaves Tibet, which Beijing annexed in 1951.

By occupying Tibet, China effectively redrew the water map of much of Asia. The Tibetan Plateau is the source of ten major river systems that together sustain nearly one-fifth of the world’s population. China’s intensive dam-building and resource extraction across the plateau since the 1990s thus poses a growing risk to Asian water security, ecological stability and regional peace. Control over the headwaters of key transboundary rivers confers immense leverage, turning water into a potential geopolitical tool and raising the specter of environmental disaster and conflict.

Nothing illustrates these dangers more starkly than the current gargantuan project, which officially began in 2025, although evidence suggests preparatory work started much earlier. What is taking shape is, in strategic terms, a hydrological weapon system. It is capable of degrading fragile ecosystems while giving China unprecedented coercive leverage over South Asia — especially India.

There is also a profound seismic gamble. The project lies in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide.

Geologists warn of reservoir-triggered seismicity, in which the immense weight of stored water increases stress along fault lines, even if the statistical probability of a major quake remains uncertain. A partial failure, caused by an earthquake or a massive landslide into a reservoir, could unleash a cascading flood racing toward India’s densely populated Assam Valley, with catastrophic consequences for downstream communities, cities and infrastructure.

What makes this project uniquely destabilizing is not only its scale but its opacity. China has released no meaningful technical details, including information on design parameters or water-storage capacity. The project has proceeded without environmental impact assessments open to international scrutiny and without consultation with downstream states that stand to bear the greatest risks.

This is a textbook case of hydrological hegemony: unilateral control over a shared lifeline exercised by an upstream power.

The international response has been strikingly muted. Governments that rightly scrutinize Chinese ports, telecommunications networks and supply chains have largely treated this mega-project as a regional matter rather than a global concern. That is a mistake. Water insecurity is a well-documented accelerator of conflict, forced migration and state fragility. A project capable of degrading ecosystems and affecting tens of millions of people downstream implicates not only Asian stability but the international order itself.

China’s Brahmaputra mega-system should therefore be understood for what it is: an unprecedented experiment in high-altitude engineering, ecological transformation and geopolitical leverage rolled into one. It is a strategic instrument whose consequences will flow far beyond the Himalayas.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

China’s bullying of Japan is backfiring in the Taiwan Strait

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Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve.

By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will.

Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe that even Japan — the world’s third-largest economy and a US treaty ally — could be cowed into compliance.

In unleashing an unusually ferocious campaign of diplomatic, economic and military pressure against Tokyo, Beijing pointedly targeted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) telephoned US President Donald Trump to vent his fury at Takaichi. And, by seeking to inflict pain on Japan through undeclared economic warfare, Xi’s regime sought to marshal Japanese business lobbies against the country’s first female prime minister, who heads a narrow conservative coalition.

The catalyst was Takaichi’s warning in parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, triggering Tokyo’s right to collective self-defense under its 2015 security legislation. That language was not rhetorical; it carried real legal and strategic consequences. That legislation allows Tokyo to exercise the right of collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s own survival.

In clarifying what geography has long dictated, Takaichi made explicit what Beijing hoped to keep ambiguous: Japan cannot remain a bystander in a Taiwan contingency.

Taiwan, once ruled by Imperial Japan, is not a distant flashpoint for Tokyo. It lies along the same island chain as Japan — a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago that underpins Japan’s own security.

This reality has been highlighted by China’s live-fire drills around Taiwan that effectively rehearsed an air and sea blockade. During the drills, Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, a stark reminder that a Taiwan crisis would not remain confined to the Taiwan Strait.

It is against this background that China’s fierce, full-spectrum campaign against Japan must be seen. Chinese officials issued furious denunciations. Military pressure intensified around Japan’s southwestern islands. Economic coercion followed, including restrictions on Japanese exports and Chinese tourism to Japan, as well as threats against supply chains. The message was unmistakable: cross China’s Taiwan red lines and pay a hefty price.

It is now apparent that China made a fundamental miscalculation. Rather than intimidating Takaichi into retracting her statement, China’s bullying is pushing Japan toward greater strategic clarity — and closer operational alignment with the US, as well as more explicit contingency planning involving Taiwan.

The Japanese statement on Taiwan matters because it raises the potential costs of aggression for Beijing.

In recent years, China has used ambiguity — about US resolve, allied involvement and escalation thresholds — to preserve freedom of action in the Taiwan Strait and step up coercive pressure on Taiwan. Now, Tokyo’s linkage between Japan’s survival and Taiwan’s security narrows that ambiguity.

Any Chinese use of force would clearly risk drawing in not just Washington but also a militarily advanced Japan positioned astride China’s maritime access routes.

Japan hosts more American troops than any other US ally in the world. American forces based in Okinawa would be indispensable in any Taiwan contingency, making Japan an unavoidable participant regardless of political preferences.

In this light, China’s coercive pressure only reinforces the logic of deeper contingency planning and interoperability among the US, Japan and Taiwan. Beijing’s campaign is accelerating the very security integration it seeks to prevent.

The irony is stark. China claims its pressure is meant to deter “external interference” in what it claims is an “internal matter.” In practice, Beijing is internationalizing the Taiwan issue further — and transforming Japan from a cautious stakeholder into a more determined deterrent actor in the Taiwan Strait.

Far from reinforcing Beijing’s red lines, the Chinese campaign against Tokyo has narrowed strategic ambiguity, deepened regional alignment and raised the potential costs of any use of force against Taiwan.

Beijing has also exposed a broader pattern in its Asian strategy. By targeting Japan — a historic great power — China is signaling how it intends to deal with others in Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated nationalist wrath. This is likely to stiffen resistance among those with the capacity to push back.

Indeed, China’s coercion is already accelerating Japan’s military modernization. Tokyo has pledged to double defense spending, acquire long-range strike capabilities, and harden supply chains against economic blackmail. Collectively, these steps enhance deterrence around Taiwan, even if Taiwan is not named explicitly.

At the same time, tensions are rising in adjacent theaters. Increased Chinese military activity near the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands — known to Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) — heightens the risk of accidents and miscalculation. By widening the geographic scope of confrontation, China is multiplying escalation pathways. This is a dangerous strategy for a power that claims to value stability.

For Taiwan, the implications, paradoxically, appear reassuring. China’s effort to isolate the self-governing democracy diplomatically is instead clarifying the stakes for regional actors. Japan’s shift from studied ambiguity toward conditional clarity strengthens deterrence by signaling that a Taiwan conflict would not remain confined. That signal, more than any single weapons system, raises the threshold for war.

Simply put, China’s coercion of Japan is strategically counterproductive for Beijing and, ironically, stabilizing for Taiwan.

To be sure, all this does not guarantee stability. A more crowded and militarized environment carries its own risks. But if China’s objective is to keep Japan neutral and Taiwan isolated, its bullying campaign is a strategic own goal.

By trying to tame Japan, Beijing is compelling Tokyo to prepare more seriously. And far from weakening the emerging deterrent architecture around Taiwan, China is helping to build it.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

US Myanmar policy is helping China — it must change

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Trump’s presidency has been animated by a relentless urge to pry loose the resources of other nations. Yet in a telling contradiction, he has preserved a Biden-era policy of isolating Myanmar—now China’s largest external source of heavy rare earth elements. The result has been perverse but predictable: by constricting alternative supplies, Washington has only deepened Beijing’s near-monopoly over rare-earth supply chains, strengthening the leverage that has repeatedly forced Trump to tread carefully around China

AP Photo

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Myanmar’s generals have begun staging their long-promised national elections — the first since they seized power in 2021. Their aim is not to restore democracy, but to entrench military rule through civilian proxies. Conducted in three stages and devoid of credible opposition, the vote is merely designed to launder the junta’s legitimacy at home and abroad.

For Washington, these sham elections should prompt more than ritual moral condemnation. They highlight how the U.S., by working to isolate Myanmar through stringent sanctions, has forfeited strategic leverage in a resource-rich country where China’s influence is steadily expanding.

In a country of mounting strategic importance,, U.S. policy should aim to shape outcomes, not to remain a bystander as Beijing steadily consolidates its foothold in Myanmar and greedily exploits its resources.

China is the primary beneficiary of Myanmar’s rare-earth minerals and is deeply involved in the extraction of other resources, including jade, natural gas, oil, and timber. Most consequentially, Beijing relies on Myanmar as its largest external source of heavy rare earth elements, using these imports to underpin its dominance over global rare-earth supply chains.

As Beijing increasingly weaponizes its control over rare-earth supplies, President Trump has sought to cut deals with other countries, to loosen China’s chokehold on the American economy. That objective alone should prompt a review of U.S. policy toward Myanmar, largely shaped under former President Joe Biden, of isolating one of the world’s largest suppliers of rare earths. For it only keeps strengthening China’s hand.

The U.S. has lost ground in Myanmar largely because Biden-era policy toward that geopolitically pivotal country followed a well-worn script: sweeping sanctions, diplomatic isolation and “nonlethal” aid for rebel groups fighting the junta. The aim was to coerce the military to relinquish power and restore democratic rule.

As the fifth anniversary of the coup approaches in February, the failure of this policy is unmistakable. The generals remain firmly in control. The humanitarian toll of the internal conflict has mounted, and China has emerged as the main strategic beneficiary.

As the Trump administration charts its foreign-policy course, it should resist the temptation to double down on this failed approach. Instead, it should pursue calibrated, interest-based engagement with Myanmar — a country whose strategic value will only grow amid intensifying U.S.-China rivalry, global supply-chain realignment and the race for critical minerals.

The reality on the ground has shifted in ways that U.S. policymakers often are slow to comprehend. Myanmar’s rebel forces, which made dramatic gains in 2023 and early 2024, are now largely on the defensive. Their reversal owes less to battlefield weakness than to geopolitics. China, alarmed by the prospect of state collapse along its southern periphery, executed a sharp pivot — pressuring rebels (some trained and armed by Beijing itself) into ceasefires and reasserting its role as the ultimate power broker. Beijing’s objective is clear: stability on its own terms.

Yet Washington’s response remains frozen in time. By treating Myanmar solely as a human-rights problem rather than a strategic arena, the U.S. has ceded influence by default. Broad sanctions have weakened Myanmar’s economy but not its rulers, pushing the generals closer to Beijing — even though the country’s fiercely nationalistic military has long harbored deep suspicion of China. Meanwhile, U.S. allies in Asia have opted for pragmatic engagement with the junta to contain instability, refugee flows and illicit cross-border activity.

Engagement need not mean endorsement. The U.S. not only engages with China — the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy — but cooperates with it where interests converge.

The contrast with U.S. policy toward Myanmar’s neighbors is striking. Washington props up or works pragmatically with military-linked governments in Bangladesh and Pakistan, yet pursues a regime-change strategy in Myanmar that fuels proxy warfare and regional spillover. Such inconsistency undermines U.S. credibility and complicates relations with Asian partners that prioritize stability over ideology.

At a time when the U.S. is scrambling to diversify supply chains away from China, why should it exclude itself from Myanmar?

A calibrated strategy would replace blanket isolation with selective pressure and conditional cooperation. Sanctions should target individuals and entities directly responsible for abuses, while easing restrictions that impede humanitarian relief, economic stabilization and diplomatic access. Dialogue — bilateral or via regional intermediaries — would give Washington a seat at the table China currently dominates.

History indicates that sanctions without engagement rarely deliver political breakthroughs. More often, punitive isolation empowers external patrons willing to ignore norms altogether.

Myanmar today is not merely a domestic tragedy; it is a geopolitical battleground. Continued U.S. disengagement leaves China free to shape outcomes, lock in infrastructure corridors, secure mineral access and entrench itself as the indispensable external actor. Strategic space, once lost, will be difficult to recover.

The election will not legitimize Myanmar’s rulers. But it should legitimize a long-overdue rethink in Washington. The Trump administration has an opportunity to reshape policy in a way that advances U.S. interests, constrains China’s influence and reclaims leverage in a country that will matter more and more in the years ahead.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

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China’s bullying of Japan is backfiring in the Taiwan Strait

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Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve.

By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will.

Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe that even Japan — the world’s third-largest economy and a US treaty ally — could be cowed into compliance.

In unleashing an unusually ferocious campaign of diplomatic, economic and military pressure against Tokyo, Beijing pointedly targeted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) telephoned US President Donald Trump to vent his fury at Takaichi. And, by seeking to inflict pain on Japan through undeclared economic warfare, Xi’s regime sought to marshal Japanese business lobbies against the country’s first female prime minister, who heads a narrow conservative coalition.

The catalyst was Takaichi’s warning in parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, triggering Tokyo’s right to collective self-defense under its 2015 security legislation. That language was not rhetorical; it carried real legal and strategic consequences. That legislation allows Tokyo to exercise the right of collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s own survival.

In clarifying what geography has long dictated, Takaichi made explicit what Beijing hoped to keep ambiguous: Japan cannot remain a bystander in a Taiwan contingency.

Taiwan, once ruled by Imperial Japan, is not a distant flashpoint for Tokyo. It lies along the same island chain as Japan — a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago that underpins Japan’s own security.

This reality has been highlighted by China’s live-fire drills around Taiwan that effectively rehearsed an air and sea blockade. During the drills, Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, a stark reminder that a Taiwan crisis would not remain confined to the Taiwan Strait.

It is against this background that China’s fierce, full-spectrum campaign against Japan must be seen. Chinese officials issued furious denunciations. Military pressure intensified around Japan’s southwestern islands. Economic coercion followed, including restrictions on Japanese exports and Chinese tourism to Japan, as well as threats against supply chains. The message was unmistakable: cross China’s Taiwan red lines and pay a hefty price.

It is now apparent that China made a fundamental miscalculation. Rather than intimidating Takaichi into retracting her statement, China’s bullying is pushing Japan toward greater strategic clarity — and closer operational alignment with the US, as well as more explicit contingency planning involving Taiwan.

The Japanese statement on Taiwan matters because it raises the potential costs of aggression for Beijing.

In recent years, China has used ambiguity — about US resolve, allied involvement and escalation thresholds — to preserve freedom of action in the Taiwan Strait and step up coercive pressure on Taiwan. Now, Tokyo’s linkage between Japan’s survival and Taiwan’s security narrows that ambiguity.

Any Chinese use of force would clearly risk drawing in not just Washington but also a militarily advanced Japan positioned astride China’s maritime access routes.

Japan hosts more American troops than any other US ally in the world. American forces based in Okinawa would be indispensable in any Taiwan contingency, making Japan an unavoidable participant regardless of political preferences.

In this light, China’s coercive pressure only reinforces the logic of deeper contingency planning and interoperability among the US, Japan and Taiwan. Beijing’s campaign is accelerating the very security integration it seeks to prevent.

The irony is stark. China claims its pressure is meant to deter “external interference” in what it claims is an “internal matter.” In practice, Beijing is internationalizing the Taiwan issue further — and transforming Japan from a cautious stakeholder into a more determined deterrent actor in the Taiwan Strait.

Far from reinforcing Beijing’s red lines, the Chinese campaign against Tokyo has narrowed strategic ambiguity, deepened regional alignment and raised the potential costs of any use of force against Taiwan.

Beijing has also exposed a broader pattern in its Asian strategy. By targeting Japan — a historic great power — China is signaling how it intends to deal with others in Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated nationalist wrath. This is likely to stiffen resistance among those with the capacity to push back.

Indeed, China’s coercion is already accelerating Japan’s military modernization. Tokyo has pledged to double defense spending, acquire long-range strike capabilities, and harden supply chains against economic blackmail. Collectively, these steps enhance deterrence around Taiwan, even if Taiwan is not named explicitly.

At the same time, tensions are rising in adjacent theaters. Increased Chinese military activity near the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands — known to Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) — heightens the risk of accidents and miscalculation. By widening the geographic scope of confrontation, China is multiplying escalation pathways. This is a dangerous strategy for a power that claims to value stability.

For Taiwan, the implications, paradoxically, appear reassuring. China’s effort to isolate the self-governing democracy diplomatically is instead clarifying the stakes for regional actors. Japan’s shift from studied ambiguity toward conditional clarity strengthens deterrence by signaling that a Taiwan conflict would not remain confined. That signal, more than any single weapons system, raises the threshold for war.

Simply put, China’s coercion of Japan is strategically counterproductive for Beijing and, ironically, stabilizing for Taiwan.

To be sure, all this does not guarantee stability. A more crowded and militarized environment carries its own risks. But if China’s objective is to keep Japan neutral and Taiwan isolated, its bullying campaign is a strategic own goal.

By trying to tame Japan, Beijing is compelling Tokyo to prepare more seriously. And far from weakening the emerging deterrent architecture around Taiwan, China is helping to build it.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

If China can bully Japan, it can bully anyone

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If China can punish Japan — economically powerful, diplomatically influential and protected by a U.S. defense treaty — then no other country should imagine itself beyond Beijing's reach.

If China can punish Japan — economically powerful, diplomatically influential and protected by a U.S. defense treaty — then no other country should imagine itself beyond Beijing’s reach. 

By Brahma Chellaney
Contributing Writer, The Japan Times

China’s latest confrontation with Japan is more than a bilateral spat. It is a warning shot to all of Asia — and to the U.S., Japan’s treaty ally.

By trying to bludgeon a major democracy into accepting its “red lines,” above all on Taiwan, China is exposing the raw coercive logic now powering its foreign policy. Its willingness to target Japan — a historic great power and today the world’s third-largest economy — telegraphs how Beijing intends to deal with the rest of Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated use of nationalist fury.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s warning that a Chinese assault on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan — enabling the country to exercise its right to collective self-defense — provoked not a routine diplomatic protest but a ferocious, full-spectrum backlash. Beijing answered with a sweeping coercive campaign that showcases its new playbook — and its growing willingness, as it earlier demonstrated against India, to impose costs even on countries far too large and powerful to be cowed easily.

Beijing’s reprisals against Japan have been broad, theatrical and unmistakably punitive. Officials have issued warnings to Chinese tourists and students to avoid Japan, dispatched naval vessels to the waters of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, suspended diplomatic engagements and threatened further freezes in economic and cultural exchanges.

The now-deleted threat by the Chinese consul general in Osaka to “chop off” Takaichi’s “filthy head” was extraordinary not only for its crudity. It showed how emboldened China’s “wolf warrior” apparatus has become, with state media amplifying the incitement rather than disavowing it.

The escalation is deliberate. Beijing is not merely signaling displeasure; it is trying to shock Japanese society, especially business and political elites, into pressuring Takaichi to back off her Taiwan stance. Intimidation is the strategy by seeking to weaponize Japan’s economic dependence on China and making an example of a country others consider too powerful to be pushed around.

China is waging an economic war on Japan in all but name — slapping de facto bans on seafood imports, freezing group tours, stalling Japanese film releases and even scrapping trilateral summits. Airline cancellations have gutted winter travel bookings. For the Japanese economy, these are not pinpricks but calculated moves to hurt and to coerce.

This is not new behavior. Beijing has repeatedly used trade as a weapon against countries that defy its wishes — from Australia and South Korea to Norway, Lithuania, Mongolia, the Philippines and India. But until now it has typically calibrated such punishment to avoid meaningful blowback to its own business interests. Going after Japan marks a bolder escalation: an effort to show that crossing Beijing carries a price even for a major power, and that no state — however large — is beyond China’s coercive reach.

By inflicting economic pain, China is seeking to marshal political challengers and business lobbies in Japan against Takaichi, who heads a narrow conservative coalition. Beijing’s objective is to try and reshape Japan’s political landscape from the outside. This is a tactic it has used to strong-arm smaller neighbors, but now it is brazenly attempting it against a Group of Seven power.

China has intensified the pressure by also reviving its familiar historical narrative of Japan as an aggressive, unrepentant militarist state. By invoking World War II “victory,” questioning Okinawa’s sovereignty and accusing Japan of “remilitarization,” Beijing is recasting Takaichi’s remarks as dangerous provocations rather than straightforward defensive clarifications. The messaging is aimed at two audiences: to stir renewed nationalism at home by portraying Xi Jinping’s regime as standing firm against Japanese “aggression,” and to make it harder for other nations to align openly with Japan’s concerns over Taiwan.

Weaponizing history in this way is classic wolf-warrior diplomacy — a tactic meant to force the target onto the defensive and to reframe Chinese coercion as justified self-protection.

The most ominous element of Beijing’s campaign is its geopolitical message. If China can punish Japan — economically powerful, diplomatically influential and protected by a U.S. defense treaty — then no other country should imagine itself beyond reach. The lesson Beijing wants others to absorb is clear: Stay silent on Taiwan, on Chinese expansionism from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas and on human rights abuses in China — or pay a steep price. This is coercive diplomacy elevated into a foreign-policy doctrine.

Tokyo, however, has not buckled. Takaichi has held her ground, clarifying but not retracting her statement, and polls show broad public unease over China’s behavior.

If Japan withstands the pressure until Beijing is forced to scale back, it will send an unmistakable signal that China’s coercion can be resisted. Indeed, Beijing may be accelerating the very alignments it fears — including tighter U.S.-Japan strategic coordination, deeper informal links among Tokyo, Taipei, Canberra and New Delhi, and a greater appetite in Asia for pushback against Chinese coercion.

What was meant as a warning to Asia may instead become a rallying cry. Japan is teaching the region that standing up to coercion is not only necessary — it is possible. And reinforcing the perception that China’s aggressive rise poses an expanding threat to Asian and global security.

Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Taiwan in the age of Trump: Navigating the perils of US unpredictability

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Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment.

Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield.

Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical threat”; the next day, he boasts of his “beautiful friendship” with strongman Xi Jinping (習近平) and dangles the prospect of a “big, beautiful trade deal.”

This policy whiplash now defines Taiwan’s strategic dilemma. For Xi, inconsistency in Washington is not confusion — it is a potential opportunity for Beijing.

The most immediate concern for Taiwan is security. Trump’s national security team may be hawkish on China, but the president’s own words send mixed signals. His claim that Taiwan has “stolen” the US semiconductor industry, and his suggestion that the island must “pay” America for its defense, reveal a mindset that treats a democratic partner as a negotiable asset.

Consider his deliberate ambiguity on whether the United States would defend Taiwan. Trump prizes flexibility and wields unpredictability as leverage. But in the Taiwan context, such volatility invites miscalculation. It emboldens Beijing to probe US resolve while forcing Taipei to prepare for both extremes — an American president who might sell arms one day and trade them away the next.

America’s commitment to Taiwan is not an act of charity but a crucial test of Washington’s strategy for ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific region. If Washington were to treat Taiwan’s defense as a matter for negotiation, every US ally in Asia would take note. A president who views security commitments as liabilities rather than force multipliers risks unraveling US-led alliances.

Economically, Trump’s aggressive trade stance toward China also cuts both ways for Taiwan. The Washington-Beijing trade war has accelerated the relocation of supply chains away from China, benefiting Taiwan’s manufacturing and high-tech sectors and making TSMC indispensable to the global economy.

Yet the US unpredictability driving decoupling also threatens Taiwan’s prosperity. Trump’s tariff policies have rarely spared allies. His hints at new duties on foreign-made semiconductors and his relentless “America First” rhetoric make clear that strategic alignment offers no immunity from economic nationalism. Taiwan’s lesson is straightforward: it must continue to diversify export markets and deepen trade ties with other democracies.

Diplomatically, Trump’s instincts make it harder for Taiwan to boost its international profile. Under President Joe Biden, the United States worked closely with allies through the G7 and Quad to underscore that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are shared global interests. That coordination gave Taipei indirect backing. Trump, by contrast, prefers bilateral deals that showcase US leverage, not collective purpose. He often sees allies not as partners but as free riders.

If this unilateralist approach takes hold, Taiwan could face a grim scenario: sharper US-China rivalry without the stabilizing framework of coordinated US-led deterrence. Japan and South Korea, wary of being dragged into a US-China clash, might hedge — leaving Taiwan more isolated just when it needs a united front.

Taiwan cannot control the impulses of a mercurial American president. But it can — and must — control how it responds.

To help offset presidential unpredictability, one imperative is to institutionalize ties with the stable pillars of US policymaking — Congress, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Expanding those linkages, especially through defense dialogues, arms co-production, and high-level exchanges, will help Taiwan hedge against sudden policy reversals.

More importantly, Taiwan must double down on self-reliance. Its shift toward asymmetric defense, civil resilience, and whole-of-society preparedness is the right strategy. Trump’s volatility only heightens the need for Taiwan to hold the line alone — at least until US support arrives, if it arrives. A deterrence posture built on self-defense credibility reduces both temptation and opportunity for Chinese adventurism.

Taiwan’s best safeguard against US unpredictability is to make itself indispensable to the democratic world. Stronger partnerships with Japan, India, Australia, and Europe can transform it from a regional flashpoint into a global stake in the balance of power. Once embedded in the world’s economic and security networks, Taiwan becomes not a chip to be bargained but a cornerstone of the free world’s credibility.

More fundamentally, Taiwan’s challenge under Trump 2.0 is to harness the deterrent benefits of a tougher US posture toward China while insulating itself from the risks of a volatile presidency. This requires balancing strategic alignment with strategic autonomy: staying close enough to Washington to strengthen deterrence, yet independent enough to withstand political mood swings there.

Trump’s unpredictability may not be new, but its consequences for Taiwan could be fateful. The island’s security, economy, and diplomacy all hinge on navigating a US policy that can suddenly shift with a social media post. The paradox is that a more assertive America may deter China, but a more erratic one could also embolden it.

For Taiwan, the challenge is not just to weather US unpredictability, but to rise above it — by anchoring its destiny to the shared purpose of the free world.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

Xi’s Purges Reveal His Insecurity

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From surveilling and repressing Chinese citizens to firing and prosecuting potential rivals, Chinese President Xi Jinping seems able to rule only through fear. But fear is not a foundation for long-term stability, and the more Xi seeks to consolidate power, the more vulnerable his position becomes.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

During his 13 years in power, Xi Jinping has steadily tightened his grip on all levers of authority in China – the Communist Party of China (CPC), the state apparatus, and the military – while expanding surveillance into virtually every aspect of society. Yet his recent purge of nine top-ranking generals, like those before it, shows that he still sees enemies everywhere.

After taking power in 2012, Xi launched a crackdown on corruption within the CPC and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The campaign was initially popular, because China’s one-party system is rife with graft and abuse of power. But it soon became clear that enforcement was highly selective – a tool not for building a more transparent or effective system, but for consolidating power in Xi’s hands. In Xi’s China, advancement depends less on competence or integrity than on earning the leader’s personal trust.

But even after more than a decade of promoting only loyalists, Xi continues to dismiss officials regularly, including top military commanders. According to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, nearly five million officials at all levels of government have been indicted for corruption under Xi. And this is to say nothing of those who simply disappear without explanation.

True to form, Xi’s regime claims that the military leaders swept up by his latest purge – including General He Weidong, a member of the Politburo, Vice Chair of the Central Military Commission, and the third-highest-ranking figure in China’s military hierarchy – committed “disciplinary violations” and “duty-related crimes.” But a more plausible explanation is that Xi is playing an interminable game of Whac-a-Rival, desperately trying to preserve his grip on power.

Xi’s fears are not entirely misplaced: each new purge deepens mistrust among China’s elite and risks turning former loyalists into enemies. From Mao Zedong to Joseph Stalin, there is ample evidence that one-man rule breeds paranoia. By now, Xi may well have lost the ability to distinguish allies from foes. At 72, Xi remains so insecure in his position that, unlike even Mao, he has refused to designate a successor, fearing that a visible heir could hasten his own downfall.

None of this bodes well for China. By refusing to lay the groundwork for an eventual leadership transition, Xi sharply increases the risk that the end of his rule – however that comes – will usher in political instability. In the meantime, Xi’s emphasis on personal fealty over ideological conformity is weakening institutional cohesion in a system once grounded in collective leadership. Coupled with his arbitrary firings and prosecutions, Chinese governance is now increasingly defined by sycophancy and anxiety, rather than competence and consistency.

China’s military is paying a particularly steep price for Xi’s insecurity. In recent years, the PLA has undergone sweeping structural reforms aimed at transforming it into a modern fighting force capable of “winning informationized wars.” But Xi’s purges risk undermining this effort by disrupting military planning and leadership. For example, his abrupt removal in 2023 of the leaders of the PLA’s Rocket Force, which oversees China’s arsenal of nuclear and conventional missiles, may have jeopardized China’s strategic deterrent.

Replacing experienced commanders with untested loyalists might ensure Xi’s political survival – and Chinese leaders have often used the military to safeguard their own power – but it does nothing for national security. And when generals are preoccupied primarily with political survival, both morale and operational readiness suffer. Can the PLA fight and win a war against a major adversary like the United States or India while operating under the political constraints Xi has imposed on it?

So far, Xi has advanced his expansionist agenda through stealth and coercion rather than open warfare. But a paranoid leader surrounded by sycophants unwilling or unable to challenge him is always at risk of strategic miscalculation. Recall that Stalin decimated the Red Army’s leadership on the eve of the Nazi invasion – with disastrous results. In Xi’s case, it might be China that does the invading, if he orders an amphibious assault on Taiwan.

For all the pomp surrounding China’s rise, the country is beset by structural problems, including a slowing economy, rising youth unemployment, and an aging and declining population. Popular discontent may well be growing, but it is masked by repression, just as any potential challenge to Xi’s leadership is preempted by purges and prosecutions. Ultimately, Xi seems able to rule only through fear.

But fear is not a foundation for long-term stability. A leader consumed by fear of disloyalty may command obedience but not genuine fidelity. Obedience is not merely a poor substitute for strength; it can become a source of fragility, as it leaves little room for creativity, competency, or collaboration. The great irony of Xi’s approach is that the more he seeks to consolidate power in his own hands, the more vulnerable his rule becomes.

Mao’s purges culminated in chaos and national trauma. Xi’s methods are more sophisticated, but the underlying logic is the same – as could be the results.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

China’s Himalayan mega-dam is a global threat

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The largest dam ever conceived symbolizes China’s bid, from oil to water, for 21st-century dominance

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Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

20250912 dam

China is about to upend the world’s hydrological balance — with consequences as far-reaching as climate change itself.

Its $168 billion Himalayan super-dam represents not merely the world’s costliest infrastructure project but also one of its riskiest. What Beijing portrays as an engineering marvel is in fact an ecological disaster in the making.

The dam is being constructed on the Yarlung Zangbo River (also known as the Brahmaputra), just before it curves into India. The project’s significance was underscored by the fact that Chinese Premier Li Qiang, flanked by senior officials and leaders of major state-owned enterprises, formally announced the groundbreaking in July, although satellite imagery had indicated activity at the site for some time.

The last time a Chinese leader inaugurated a dam project was 1994, when then-Premier Li Peng presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. That symbolic parallel underscores the magnitude of the Brahmaputra mega-dam — an undertaking that will surpass the Three Gorges in scale, ambition and peril.

The Three Gorges Dam was initially celebrated as a modern wonder but is now widely recognized as an environmental and social disaster: It displaced more than a million people, triggered recurrent landslides, degraded water quality and disturbed seismic stability. Its mammoth reservoir has even slightly slowed the Earth’s rotation.

China’s new megaproject is in an even more fragile setting: one of the world’s most seismically active zones, straddling a heavily militarized frontier where Beijing claims India’s sprawling Arunachal Pradesh state as “South Tibet.” Constructing the world’s largest dam atop a geological fault line is more than reckless — it is a calculated gamble with catastrophic potential. Any collapse, whether from structural weakness or reservoir-induced seismicity, would devastate India’s northeast and Bangladesh, placing tens of millions at risk.

The dam, designed to generate nearly three times the electricity of the Three Gorges Dam, was approved by the National People’s Congress in March 2021. Yet the project remained cloaked in secrecy until the recent announcement, true to Beijing’s pattern of concealing work on major dams along international rivers until commercially available satellite imagery makes it impossible to hide.

The Brahmaputra, unlike most rivers, is an ecological lifeline, sustaining one of the world’s most biodiverse regions as it descends sharply from Himalayan heights to form the longest and steepest canyon on Earth — twice as deep as America’s Grand Canyon. It is here that China is constructing the behemoth dam to tap the unparalleled concentration of river energy.

Originating in Tibet’s mountain springs, the world’s highest-altitude major river flows through India and Bangladesh, supporting agriculture, fisheries and dense populations. Its annual floods, while destructive, flush toxins, recharge groundwater and deposit nutrient-rich sediment vital for farming. The super-dam will upend this rhythm, trapping silt, shrinking Bangladesh’s delta already imperiled by rising seas and depriving Indian farmers of natural fertilization cycles. Saltwater intrusion and catastrophic floods would become more frequent.

But Beijing sees water not just as a resource; it sees it as power. By placing a mega-dam just before the river leaves Tibet, China would acquire a hydraulic chokehold over hundreds of millions downstream.

Control over oil once defined global power. And, in the 21st century, control over transboundary rivers may prove just as decisive. With the dam, China would hold the ability to weaponize water without firing a shot.

The dam’s enormous price tag reflects not just ambition to generate enormous amounts of electricity but a determination to cement China’s hydro-hegemony through dominance over Asia’s lifelines. This would give Beijing the same strategic leverage over water as OPEC once enjoyed over oil — but with far greater immediacy for the daily survival of populations.

In fact, since annexing Tibet in 1951, China has become the source of cross-border river flows to more countries than any other upstream power. It has built more large dams than the rest of the world combined, with its spree since the 1990s focused on international rivers. Its 11 giant dams on the Mekong have already wreaked havoc downstream, deepening droughts and undercutting livelihoods in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Yet Beijing continues to reject any form of water sharing. It has signed no water-sharing treaty with any neighbor, nor joined the 1997 U.N. Watercourses Convention — the only global treaty governing shared rivers — preferring instead to assert “indisputable sovereignty” over all waters within its borders.

The stakes extend beyond Asia. Tibet is warming twice as fast as the global average, accelerating glacier melt and permafrost thaw. With its towering height rising into the troposphere, the Tibetan Plateau shapes the Asian monsoons, stabilizes climate across Eurasia and influences the Northern Hemisphere’s atmospheric general circulation — the vast system of winds that helps define different climate zones by transporting warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes.

Tampering with the plateau’s hydrology is not just a regional gamble; it is a planetary risk. Altered river flows from Tibet will ripple outward into weather systems, food security and even migration patterns far beyond Asia.

If Beijing succeeds in monopolizing transboundary rivers, other states may be tempted to follow, eroding fragile cooperative frameworks elsewhere — from the Nile Basin to the Tigris-Euphrates. The mega-dam is thus not merely Asia’s problem but the world’s. The precedent it sets could destabilize water security worldwide at a moment when droughts and extreme weather are already straining societies.

This gargantuan dam is a geopolitical and ecological catastrophe in waiting, with its dangers already coming into view. Silence is complicity: The international community must press China to respect international water norms.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.