Arvind's Newsletter

1.Sajjan Jindal group had expressed interest in entering the emerging Passenger car EV market a few months earlier. Now comes news reports that they are in talks with two Chinese owned companies MG Motors India and BYD India to pick up a equity stake. The story is still conjecture and not confirmed but is still worth following if it develops further. BYD is today the world’s largest producer of EVs and MG Motors is owned by SAIC Motor Corp which is the world’d 12th largest in production of EVs.

2.A new set of textbooks, part of the “rationalised syllabus” by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)—an autonomous organisation under the federal education ministry—omits chapters on Mughal rulers from Indian school textbooks.

Effectively, students can study some of the history of Mughals in Class 7 (around age 12), a little in Class 8, none in Classes 9 to 11, and a shortened version in Class 12, according to Indian Express, which inspected each textbook for chapters on and references of the Mughal era

Before the school syllabus overhaul, undergraduate courses in Delhi University’s BA History honors program had already axed and revamped chapters relating to Mughal history.

Supporters of the revamp argue the Mughals have been overrepresented in Indian history and this is all part of what they call “right-sizing.”

3.Beijing walked back remarks by a senior Chinese diplomat questioning the sovereignty of the continent’s ex-Soviet states. Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to Paris, told a French broadcaster that former Soviet countries did not have “status in international law.” The comment demonstrated why much of Europe distrusts Beijing’s claim to be neutral over Russia’s war in Ukraine. Lithuania’s foreign minister tweeted a clip of the interview, adding, “If anyone is still wondering why the Baltic States don’t trust China to ‘broker peace in Ukraine’.” In a letter to Le Monde, dozens of EU parliamentarians called on France’s foreign minister to declare Lu person non grata. Beijing said today it “respects the sovereign state status” of all ex-Soviet states.

4.Apple is taking a scattershot approach to the upcoming Reality headset’s features, hoping that a wide variety of options will get consumers to try the product, reports noted technology columnist Mark Gurman in his column in Bloomberg.

When Apple Inc. set out to develop a headset about seven years ago, it hired a former NASA engineer who had used augmented and virtual reality to explore Mars. The big question at the time: Why would an ordinary consumer need such a device?

As the company gets ready to unveil the product in June, that question is still hanging in the air. Apple hasn’t really found a killer app that will make the roughly $3,000 headset a must-have item. Instead, it’s trying another tactic: throwing everything but the kitchen sink at consumers.

Apple plans to pack the headset with a variety of features — games, fitness services, even an app for reading books in virtual reality — and hope that buyers find something they like.

It’s not such a wild approach. After all, Apple did the same thing when it unveiled its watch.

5.The new Cold War has meant that the globalisation trend over the past five decades since China opened up is unwinding. Tom Friedman wrote one of the early books on globalisation and how it was changing the world (The World is Flat) nearly two decades back.

In this piece, Friedman reports from on the ground in China on what exactly are America and China fighting about and opines that unlike the earlier Cold War when Russia and USA were largely de-coupled economically this time the Cold War 2.0 between China and USA (and its allies) will be much more complicated as the countries are economically integrated and total de-coupling will be painful and disruptive for both. Long Read. Some excerpts from his piece:

“China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

But generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real problem for China, because it will have to build many guardrails into its own generative A.I. systems to limit what Chinese citizens can ask and what the computer can answer. If you can’t ask whatever you want, including what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and if your A.I. system is always trying to figure out what to censor, where to censor and whom to censor, it will be less productive.”

“The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists that are not always visible to the naked eye.
… One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

America knew how to deal with Nazi Germany, an economic and military peer, but a country with which we were not deeply economically intertwined. America knew how to deal with the Soviet Union, a military peer but nowhere near our economic peer, and a country with which we were not economically intertwined at all.”

“…Americans’ favourite device is an iPhone assembled mostly in China, and until recently the favoured foreign destination of Chinese college students — some 300,000 of them today — is America. That makes for some weird scenes, like watching one country shoot down another country’s intelligence balloon just after the two countries in 2022 set a record in annual bilateral trade.”

“Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet. When so many more products or services became digitised and connected, so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

In the Cold War it was relatively easy to say that this fighter jet is a weapon and that that phone is a tool. But when we install the ability to sense, digitise, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favourite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons. And, as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.”

‘The role of trust in international relations and commerce took one more great leap for another reason: As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.”

“… When you ask them what is the secret that enables Taiwan’s TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

“TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions. In doing so, TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.”

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

“But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.