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About
Thant Myint-U's Where China Meets India is a vivid, searching, timely book about the remote region that is suddenly a geopolitical center of the world.
From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River.
Soon this last great frontier will vanish-the forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies crushed-leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography-as sudden and profound as the opening of the Suez Canal-will lead to unprecedented connections among the three billion people of Southeast Asia and the Far East.
What will this change mean? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. Over the past few years, he has traveled extensively across this vast territory, where high-speed trains and gleaming new shopping malls are now coming within striking distance of the last far-flung rebellions and impoverished mountain communities. And, he has explored the new strategic centrality of Burma, where Asia's two rising, giant powers appear to be vying for supremacy.
At once, a travelogue, a work of history, and an informed look into the future. Where China Meets India takes us across the fast-changing Asian frontier, giving us a masterful account of the region's long and rich history and its sudden significance for the rest of the world.
From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River.
Soon this last great frontier will vanish-the forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies crushed-leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography-as sudden and profound as the opening of the Suez Canal-will lead to unprecedented connections among the three billion people of Southeast Asia and the Far East.
What will this change mean? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. Over the past few years, he has traveled extensively across this vast territory, where high-speed trains and gleaming new shopping malls are now coming within striking distance of the last far-flung rebellions and impoverished mountain communities. And, he has explored the new strategic centrality of Burma, where Asia's two rising, giant powers appear to be vying for supremacy.
At once, a travelogue, a work of history, and an informed look into the future. Where China Meets India takes us across the fast-changing Asian frontier, giving us a masterful account of the region's long and rich history and its sudden significance for the rest of the world.
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Reviews
"[A] blend of personal reminiscence, history--enlivened with an eye for the telling anecdote--travelogue and polemic."
The Economist
"[Where China Meets India] possesses a heartfelt and welcome optimism, giving voice to a desire for connections that exceeds all notions of foreign policy, geopolitics or business and becomes, instead, about people encountering each other in all their glorious difference."
Siddhartha Deb, The Guardian
"Thant Myint-U makes clear in Where China Meets India [that] Burma's days as a neglected backwater are over."
Tim Johnston, Financial Times