Recent BooksSeptember/October 2019 239the countries o Southeast Asia. India
should develop the ability to produce
advanced weapons systems domesti-
cally, strengthen its inÇuence in Bhutan
and Nepal, build military bases on Indian
Ocean islands, and adopt a nuclear
¿rst-use policy to deter Chinese aggres-
sion. New Delhi should even play “the
Tibet and Uyghur cards,” a disruptive
proposal that Karnad does not spell out
in detail. India’s entrenched and uncoor-
dinated security bureaucracy is unlikely to
adopt these ideas. But Karnad makes a
bracing case that i it does not, India will
continue to play a “small stakes game
anchored in short policy horizons.”The East Turkestan Independence
Movement, 1930s to 1940s
BY WANG KE. TRANSLATED BY
CARISSA FLETCHER. Chinese
University Press, 2019, 384 pp.The crisis in Xinjiang, where Chinese
authorities have locked up an estimated
one million or more Uighurs in “reeduca-
tion camps” in an attempt, they claim, to
eliminate terrorism, is an object lesson in
William Faulkner’s aphorism “The past is
never dead. It’s not even past.” Neither
the Uighur population nor the Chinese
authorities have forgotten the short-lived
Islamic Republic o East Turkestan o 1933
to 1934 or the longer and more institu-
tionalized East Turkestan Republic o
1944 to 1946. Both grew out o the Uighur
enlightenment movement, whose leading
thinkers believed that Han rulers had
treated the Uighurs unfairly ever since
their region was incorporated into China
in the late nineteenth century. Wang uses
original documents in many languages
to bring the current crisis into historical
focus. The two Uighur independenceand complementary economic strengths
are drawing Germany closer to China.
China is promoting integration through
its Belt and Road Initiative, seeking to
aid its giant state-owned enterprises,
which are desperate to reach beyond their
saturated home market. Integration
could be slowed by an economic crisis
or an ethnoreligious conÇict in China
or by ambivalence in other countries
about Chinese inÇuence, but it would take
a cataclysm to stop it. Calder thinks that
China will seek not U.S.-style hegemony
but a new kind o inÇuence in which the
bene¿ts o integration are more widely
distributed among countries, which he
labels “distributive globalism.” I so, he
recommends that the United States
cooperate with countries such as India
and Japan, and even to some extent
with China, to promote pluralism
within the zone o Chinese inÇuence.
Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and
India’s Global Ambition
BY BHARAT KARNAD. Penguin
Viking, 2018, 512 pp.
Karnad, a prominent Indian conserva-
tive strategist, deÇates Narendra Modi’s
image as a nationalist strongman and
risk-taker, at least as far as foreign policy
is concerned. He diagnoses the Indian
prime minister as an authoritarian who
is nevertheless averse to the kind o bold
change needed to move India beyond its
current status o “great power lite.” To
realize India’s proper role, Karnad thinks,
the country must drop its misguided
obsession with Pakistan and focus on
China; it should, however, avoid align-
ing with an overweening and unreliable
United States and forge links with other
powers, such as Australia, Japan, and