.
.
.
Clarity must follow in this sensitive area, and no mixed signals from INDIA at a time when there are tensions between two Asian brother countries. Joint Military exercises between India and China MUST continue as well as regular LAC negotiations.
1. JAPAN-CHINA TRADE: The official China Daily, citing figures from China's General Administration of Customs, reported that bilateral trade fell 5.1 percent in 2013, to US$312.55 billion.
2. JAPAN-INDIA TRADE: "With trade between India and Japan at $18.51 billion, Tokyo accounts for a 2.34% share in India’s global trade with petroleum products, oil meals, marine products, gems and jewellery and iron ore being the principal commodities of export to Japan while machinery, iron & steel, electronic goods, transport equipment and project goods are the major items that India imports in 2013." Financialexpress.com
"China was clearly alarmed by this development, evident in the commentary that appeared in the Communist Party organ, Global Times. Calling Japanese “petty burglars” and “international provocateurs,” it warned India of getting close to Japan “at its own peril.” Clearly, Beijing has not missed the emerging balance of power in Asia." The Diplomat.
3. INDIA-CHINA TRADE: $70 Billion 2013......$100 billion by 2015.
___________________________________
"Japan and India are natural allies whose fast-growing relationship is remarkably free of any strategic dissonance. So, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Tokyo visit this week stands in sharp contrast to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s just concluded India tour, which, behind the hype, helped to underscore the deep Sino-Indian divide.
.
India, China and Japan, constituting Asia’s pivotal triangle, are transforming relations among themselves in a way that portends growing strategic collaboration between New Delhi and Tokyo but sharper geopolitical competition between China and the other two Asian powers.
.
The Sino-Indian relationship was recently disturbed by a stealthy incursion across the disputed Himalayan border by the People’s Liberation Army, which pulled back its troops just in time to allow Li to go ahead with a scheduled visit to India. The visit helped shine a spotlight on a negative aspect extending beyond the Himalayan tensions — India’s ballooning trade deficit with Beijing, compounded by China’s import of mainly primary commodities while exporting finished products. A flood of cheap Chinese goods has undercut Indian manufacturing.
.
The lopsided economic engagement gives China little incentive to bridge a widening political divide with India. If anything, it encourages China to continue with a strategy to keep India under strategic pressure so as to regionally contain it.
.
With China exporting more than 2½ times as much as it imports, its already-large trade surplus with India will only swell if the two countries meet their target of raising bilateral trade from the current level of nearly $70 billion to $100 billion by 2015. Despite its recent border incursion, China has focused on raking in more profits from the Indian market. Li himself underscored the difficulty of correcting the fundamental imbalance in trade by taking exporters in his large business team to India.
.
Economic problems in the West, by contributing to a slowdown in China, have only increased the importance of the Indian market for Beijing. This is what prompted Li to choose India as his first overseas destination for an official visit. This factor has also encouraged China’s cash-rich, state-supported banks to offer debt financing to heavily indebted Indian companies that commit to buy Chinese equipment or supply raw materials.
.
While swamping the Indian market with its products, China has made it difficult for Indian exporters to gain much of a foothold in its own market, including in sectors where India is strong such as pharmaceuticals and information technology. As a result, India’s exports to China largely consist of low-margin, unprocessed commodities.
.
China’s increasing access to the Indian market has done little to promote a less-adversarial Chinese foreign policy. Indeed, the more profits China has reaped from its trade relationship with India, the more assertive it has become.
.
As China’s trade surplus with India has soared from just $1 billion in 2002 to $40 billion in 2013, China has openly challenged Indian sovereignty in the large Western and eastern sectors of the Himalayas. In this period, China has continued to enlarge its strategic footprint in Pakistani-held Kashmir — a disputed territory — even as sustained Chinese pressure forced India’s state-owned ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) to pull out of a contract to explore for oil in two blocks off the Vietnamese coast in the South China Sea. Beijing had warned India against “any unilateral exploration activities” in the South China Sea.
.
The Indian assumption that greater trade would make Beijing more amenable to resolving the border dispute and more sensitive to India’s other concerns has been belied. While refusing to accept the territorial status quo with India, China is also working to disturb the status quo on international river flows to its southern neighbor through an aggressive dam-building program.
India is particularly vulnerable to China’s re-engineering of transboundary flows because it alone receives nearly half of all river waters that leave Chinese territory. Beijing, however, has repeatedly spurned India’s proposal to conclude a pact or establish an intergovernmental institution to define rights and responsibilities on shared rivers. China wants only to sell flood-related hydrological data.
.
That China does not allow booming bilateral trade to get in the way of its territorial assertiveness is also manifest from the way it has ratcheted up disputes in the East and South China Seas. In fact, as underscored by its actions against Japan and the Philippines since last year, it employs trade as a political weapon. With China serving as Japan’s largest overseas market, Beijing has sought to punish Tokyo through an informal boycott of Japanese products since last September.
.
For China, trade is not only about economics but also about geostrategic interests. Beijing values the lopsided trade with India as a strategic weapon that undercuts its rival’s manufacturing base, yet yields handsome dividends for it.
.
In fact, China encourages economic dependencies so that it can manipulate them to advance its strategic objectives. In its recent territorial feuds with other neighbors, China has bared the cards it is likely to wield when faced with a diplomatic or military crisis — from employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of the vital rare-earth minerals.
.
So what can India do to prevent China from using its trade prowess for political ends?
.
First, it must avoid any commercial dependency that cannot be easily be substituted with imports from elsewhere.
.
Second, it must aggressively contain the flood of Chinese-made subsidized goods through anti-dumping measures and countervailing duties, or else it will become harder for it to develop a more mature manufacturing base.
.
Third — in the way China unofficially but assertively links economic issues with political matters — India must not shy away from linking market access to concrete progress on border and water issues."
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
Beyond dangerous empty diplomatic gestures, Japan and India need to SERIOUSLY RAISE their trade volume to $300 billion soon by 2020......FOCUS ON INFRASTRUCTURE AND INDUSTRY...which are not inflationary on the Indian economy but creates jobs, and helps Japan with greater exports and greater linkage with a new market, which is the 3rd largest economy on earth.....$5 trillion by PPP GDP and still growing.
_____________________________________________
Shinzo Abe's visit a signal to China, others
The visit of the Japanese Emperor and Empress in December, the Abe visit
will send a whole new set of signals to many in Asia and beyond . Abe will not only be the
first Japanese prime minister to be India's Republic Day chief guest,
his presence at India's annual civil-military parade, an integral part
of Indian life, will signal that the a pacifist Japan can be comfortable
with a show of military strength. 
The flowering of the India-Japan
relationship has a lot to do with the personal interest taken by Singh,
particularly during the time when prime ministers in Japan were an
annual affair. On the Japanese side, the proactive interest by Abe has
made the difference. What happens after they leave office? Tomohiko
Taniguchi, councilor, cabinet secretariat in Shinzo Abe's office, said,
"Indo-Japan relationship has had a rare bipartisan constituency in
Japan, for even under the DPJ rule the relationship made a steady
advancement especially on the strategic agendas. More generally, the
cultural and spiritual kinship has bound the two more deeply and for a
much longer span of history than would apply to any other bilateral
relationship -- remember the Okakura-Tagore friendship -- while having
no historical baggage. Also, Japan's most valuable sea lane of commerce
runs through the Indian Ocean Region, which Delhi feels responsible to
provide security. Those qualify Delhi and Tokyo as a natural partner." India's priorities vis-a-vis Japan are centred on India's own transformation project. Gautam Bambawale, joint secretary East Asia in the foreign ministry, said, "First of all, we want Japanese technology; secondly we want Japanese capital, investment into India; and thirdly we want Japanese modern management practices."
From the Japanese point of view, Taniguchi said, "The future of the Indo-Pacific region, a growth propellant for the world economy, ought to be shaped by the countries adherent to the norms and rules accepted widely by the international community. It takes democratic peers with shared values to do so and few other duos can be better fit for the task than the largest democracy in Asia that is India and its most seasoned, that is Japan."
The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) has sparked an interest among Japanese companies investing in India. Bambawale said, "In 2008, there were 555 sites where Japanese companies were functioning. In 2011, this number increased to a little more than 1,400. And it is expected that by 2015, this number will reach 2,500. Currently, there are about 1,050 Japanese companies who have their representative offices or operations in India."
Japan is likely to announce a new loan for a new project, they are already funding the development of the Chennai-Bangalore corridor. India and Japan are also looking at joint development of high-speed railways in India. The Shinkansen is in the midst of conducting a feasibility study of a high-speed railway corridor in Gujarat.
In the regional
context, India and Japan may announce a new corridor that would involve
India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, if it can be stretched, to Thailand (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam).
This is ambitious project but sources said it could dovetail into
India's own trilateral highway project. ________________________________ Just put this in for irritation value: From TOI debate (A BJP rant rag) Gopal Krishna Gokhale remarked: "What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow." 
