Recent BooksMarch/April 2020 187phy, promoting India as a “world guru”
that can solve global problems with its
civilizational wisdom o “happiness,
peace, and harmony.” He has sought more
foreign investment but still protected
Indian manufacturers from foreign
imports. And he has adopted a muscular
security stance, building up naval and
missile forces and responding forcefully
to provocations from Pakistan. Identify-
ing China as India’s main rival, Modi has
tightened India’s strategic partnerships
with other countries worried about China
and sponsored infrastructure projects to
prevent India’s South Asian neighbors
from falling totally under Beijing’s
economic inuence. Hall acknowledges
that Modi has brought his characteristic
energy to promoting India as a major
power but judges that the results have
shown more continuity than change.
India remains more protectionist than
globalist, distrusted by its neighbors, and
wary o aligning too clearly with other
powers against China.Model City: Pyongyang
BY CRISTIANO BIANCHI AND
KRISTINA DRAPIĆ. MIT Press, 2019,
224 pp.I you can’t visit Pyongyang, this is the
next best thing: a book ¥lled with photo-
graphs o its weirdly shaped and oddly
colored buildings. Under the Dear Leader
(Kim Jong Il) and the current supreme
leader (Kim Jong Un), North Korean
architects over the past quarter century
reversed an earlier trend o copying
Soviet styles. The un¥nished, 105-story
Ryugyong Hotel is built in the shape o a
rocket ship. The City o Sports complex
boasts 12 huge buildings, each devoted
to a particular game. The two-and-a-struggle between the rival regimes in
Beijing and Taipei for inuence over
Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese community.
Chinese and Indonesian archives show
how Beijing and Jakarta cooperated in
the uid politics o the global anti-impe-
rialist movement, siding in 1963–64
against what they viewed as a British
imperialist plot to create Malaysia, a
new state formed by the merger o
Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, and Singa-
pore. The book dispels the myth that
China directed the attempted coup in
1965 that led to the rise o the anticom-
munist strongman General Suharto, a
break in Sino-Indonesian relations, and
a massacre o suspected Communists,
many o them ethnic Chinese. The
Beijing-Taipei contest for inuence in
the ethnic Chinese community exacer-
bated the suspicion that the Chinese
represented a ¥fth column. Throughout
the turbulent politics o the time,
Chinese Indonesians were victims o
discrimination and violence, paradoxi-
cally accused both o capitalist exploi-
tation and o pro-Beijing loyalties—
suspicions that persist even today, when
the two countries have full diplomatic
and economic ties.
Modi and the Reinvention of Indian
Foreign Policy
BY IAN HALL. Bristol University
Press, 2019, 236 pp.
Hall oers a lucid account o¤ Indian
foreign policy since 2014, when Narendra
Modi became prime minister. Modi
promised a foreign policy revolution, has
gathered decision-making power to
himself, and has traveled abroad more
often than his predecessors. He has
articulated a Hindu nationalist philoso-