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India’s decision to closely scrutinize the FDI originating in the seven countries it shares borders with—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan—epitomizes its fear of China’s growing economic might. (Six other countries have barely any investment in India.) Chinese state enterprises are on a buying spree, looking to snap up companies on the cheap in the countries rocked by the novel coronavirus pandemic, fueling fears of a Chinese economic hegemony. India was spooked. In response, China says India’s new FDI requirements amount to violation of the WTO’s “principle of non-discrimination” as well as “the consensus of G20… to realize a free, fair, non-discriminatory, transparent, predictable and stable trade and investment environment.”

These are early signs that the post-coronavirus world will not be an easy place to trade and do business in. South Asia is projected to be among the regions that are hit the hardest by the pandemic, as their remittance-based economies struggle to tackle growing hunger and joblessness. International help will thus be crucial for the region to recover. Interestingly, even as India has restricted Chinese FDI, it is still importing gargantuan amounts of corona kits from China. Even in the post-corona world, this sort of push-and-pull relation between India and China will continue. One other area of potential conflict between them will be over the virus narrative.

Indian media has been ardently pushing the line that China is responsible for the ‘creation’ and spread of the virus. Even their more nuanced commentaries have a distinctly anti-China flavor. As India’s ex-foreign secretary Shyam Saran recently wrote in The Indian Express: “There is no escaping the fact that Covid-19 may not have become a pandemic if China were a democracy with a free flow of information… This is like original sin, which cannot be whitewashed.” In comparison, Saran lauds India’s ‘open and informed’ approach to the pandemic. He argues that during a crisis there are distinct advantages of being a democracy.

As representatives of the ‘largest democracy in the world,’ the Indian intelligentsia will look to further push this pro-democracy narrative. They will also help build pressure for the formation of a ‘concert of democracies’ both in and outside South Asia.

It is hard to say right now whether the post-corona world will be friendlier to the American IPS or to the Chinese BRI. The Americans and the Indians seem confident that China’s initial mishandling of the corona crisis makes the need for greater democracy self-evident. In this thinking, projects under the BRI will be seen suspiciously as countries will no longer trust the ‘corona-exporting’ China. In reality, the poor countries in the region, which are being further impoverished by the pandemic, will happily accept any help they can get.

As I have written in this space before, at least in Nepal, with the memories of the 2015-16 blockade still fresh, the anti-China narrative will be a hard sell. Indian meddling in South Asia is an old phenomenon, while the Chinese have only recently entered the fray. Countries like Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh would like to test for themselves if the Chinese can be trusted. Things won’t change so long as India continues to be seen as the regional hegemon.

Despite ample evidence that the novel coronavirus has spread rapidly in rich, developed countries, and left poor countries unscathed, the WHO keeps up the official pretense that it will affect all countries equally. This, in fact, has shown not to be the case, after almost 3.5 months of global contagion. 

If the scientific establishment were in the service of science (and not in the business of pushing forth the notion of European hegemony and supremacy, or marketing Big Pharma drugs), it would be asking the question: why? What factors are enabling the spread of this pulmonary disease in developed economies?

Several things stand out to me. First, the evidence that the coronavirus can survive for 72 hours on plastic. All economies devastated by the virus are plastic economies. People use plastic credit cards to pay for goods and services, they eat their takeout meals out of plastic food containers, and they buy their food from plastic bowls that have been touched by multiple hands on the chain of supply.

Second, despite the evidence, all health services have also pushed the notion that plastic is sanitary. Plastic is the only material from which PPE, which purportedly protects health workers, can be made. As you can surmise, this notion is problematic and may have led to many deaths of those at the health frontlines. The PPE may be infecting patients as well. 

Third, rich economies rely heavily on refrigeration. Food which has been sitting for hours in a cooler is considered fit to take out and eat, without warming. As anyone in South Asia knows, anything that is not hot off the stove can harbor viruses and bacteria—we know this to our detriment from many cholera, diarrhea, and other seasonal epidemics tied to hygiene. Yet in developed economies this concern is waved off as a cultural superstition of Third World peoples. Surely, the much-vaunted civilized cities of the West are so much more advanced with their fridges and cold sandwiches? 

There’s also the Asian notion that food that is cold in temperature can cause cold and flu. This is considered to be a quaint belief by the West, where ice-creams can be consumed in the middle of winter in swelteringly hot, central-heated restaurants. For Asians, cold comes not just through temperatures but certain foods considered cool/cold foods on the bodily temperature spectrum. Cucumbers and watermelons, for instance, are cooling foods, while ginger and chilly are warming foods. 

This reminds me of the children’s game we used to play, where a blindfolded child has to find someone who’s hiding. He/she is taken around by another who says, “Cold, cold, cold” or “hot, hot, hot”, depending on how close the blindfolded seeker is to the hidden person they’re trying to find. “Cold” refers to “you’re off the mark.” “Hot” means “you’re very close.” Coronavirus control, it appears to me, could do with this childhood strategy—“Cold, cold, cold” and “you’re about to give yourself a cold with this chilly food”; and “hot, hot, hot” meaning “see all those Third World people who pressure-cook their food twice a day, do not eat out, and so far haven’t caught the flu? Yes, maybe it’s the hot food that’s keeping them alive!” 

Fourth, in the countries where contagion is low or negligible there is no Amazon to distribute large numbers of plastic wrapped packages. Amazon has been in the news for several reasons—low paid workers, difficult work conditions, inability of workers to organize and ask for healthcare, lack of testing for Covid-19. There’s also a recent case in which a worker tested positive after Jeff Bezos visited the “fulfillment center.” These are perfect conditions for coronavirus infected workers to spread disease all across the country via niftily delivered packages.

Fifth, lack of well-equipped hospitals may in fact have been a boon in poor countries. A very high percentage of people who were intubated are dying after the procedure. Doctors have now gone on record saying that they misread the very low oxygen numbers and automatically put people on ventilators, not paying attention to the fact people were sitting up and talking despite low oxygen figures. The doctors have also said that the cases they see are more like altitude sickness, more than the normal kind of respiratory distress they were used to seeing. 

One factor consistent amongst Third World economies: a reliance on herbal healing. Due to lack of big machines, most people in Third World countries know of a local remedy to cure respiratory problems. The Tibetan Government in Exile just handed out a black pill composed of nine herbs to its citizens—perhaps it is the first government to do so. India’s Ayush Ministry has been active online, advising people to take Ayurvedic remedies, including “golden milk”—a small teaspoon of turmeric with hot milk. Just as the rationalists (who are dropping like flies) give a disbelieving laugh, they should first do research on which system is winning the war here. 

I would personally recommend garlic soup and timmur (Sichuan pepper) to people feeling unwell. Those two cured me of my altitude sickness when I got a pounding headache at Langtang, at 3,500 feet. If nothing else, the timmur will force oxygen into your lungs without the invasive presence of a ventilator. 

Evidence of the increasing resistance that formal education institutions and teachers face these days, including in Nepal, is aplenty. The song “Teachers leave them kids alone” plays frequently and t-shirts flash: “I was born intelligent but education ruined me”. This development of resistance, particularly in higher education, forces educators to revisit the purpose of education and the relation between teachers and students.

Times have changed. Students no longer have to rely solely on the teacher for the course content. They have similar, if not the same, access to textbooks and online materials as teachers. So teaching as dissemination of information is gradually turning into an obsolete phenomenon. Teachers can no longer remain the ‘sage on the stage’ who transfer knowledge from their buckets to the vessels that students are thought to be.

This is particularly prominent in higher education where the students come with a broad range of academic and non-academic experiences and do not identify with empty vessels waiting to be filled. Neither do they appreciate the old-school teacher-student hierarchal relationship devoid of spaces to question the content and methods used in education.

The goal of education should be to help students learn; hence the focus should be on learning rather than teaching. Goldstein (2001) explains, “A Teaching Model is didactic, deductive, top-down—the typical classroom experience. A Learning Model … is an experience that involves one’s total self—mind and body, intellect and emotion, memory and foresight. It is an active and interactive process one experiences and engages in learning”.

A cursory look at the prominent higher education institutions in Nepal provides ample evidence that they largely follow the teaching instead of the learning model. Universities (in practice, a handful of people) design the curriculum without an active engagement of key stakeholders (the teachers and the students), conduct all or larger portions of student evaluation, and exercise authority over ‘monitoring’ education. Teachers have little or no space to engage students beyond this most often ‘content heavy’ curriculum or to even provide a deeper engagement, and students are largely passive recipients of education that lopsidedly happens within the physical classrooms. I believe that higher education in Nepal will benefit by shifting from the prevalent teaching model to a learning model—the sooner the better.

Although this shift throughout the nation would require policy changes (another top-down process area!) consuming a lot of time and other resources, higher education institutions and teachers can immediately benefit by incorporating elements of learner-centered education. Maryellen Weimer (2002) in Learner Centered Teaching points to five things that change when teaching is learner-centered: the balance of power, the function of content, the role of the teacher, the responsibility for learning, and the purpose and process of evaluation.

Weimer contends that faculty controlled learning diminish student motivation and results in dependent learners. She recommends a responsible power sharing with students to positively influence their motivation and learning. She believes excessive focus on covering the content (a ubiquitous phenomenon in Nepal) restricts the development of learning skills needed to function effectively on the job and in society. This might explain why many of our graduates lack the skills and struggle to perform at workplace despite having a ‘degree’ and good grades.

A learner-centered teaching focuses on using instead of covering the content to establish a knowledge foundation and develop learning skills. Such engagements might have implications on how much content can be covered in a course. Therefore curriculum developers in Nepal should aim at designing content that can provide deep engagement, with the focus on skill development rather than controlling students through expansive content.

In learner centered teaching, Weimer explains, teachers are guides, facilitators, and designers of learning experiences and not the ‘main performers’. Students are the focus of this approach and teachers are involved in careful design of experiences, activities and assignments through which students engage with the content. Learner centered teaching encourages students to understand and accept the responsibilities for learning, including coming to class—not because of the attendance policy but because they see the activities and events of class time making important contribution to their learning. Finally, Weimer advises using evaluation to promote learning and not merely to generate grades, and to encourage student involvement through self-evaluation and peer evaluation.

So teachers should stop teaching with the view that they are the experts and students are mere recipients of knowledge. They should critically revisit the idea that learning happens with transfer of information. To borrow Sir Ken Robinson’s words from his TED Talk “How to escape education’s death valley”, teachers should also mentor, stimulate, provoke, and engage.

The author is a PhD Scholar in the School of Social Work, Boston College, MA, USA

We already have a glimpse of the post-corona world order. When the pandemic subsides, the Americans could double down on China. Trump is sure to sharpen his anti-Sinic slurs in the lead up to the presidential elections, whenever they take place. Republicans are also trying to paint Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for the president, as soft on China. As the bipartisan anti-China bias solidifies in the US capital, Biden will be forced into a more confrontational approach to Beijing. Then there are the Russians, who are again expected to meddle in the US elections. Whoever wins, the US-Russia relations will continue to be rocky.

At the same time, the India-US partnership under the Indo-Pacific Strategy will get progressively better, with a clear geopolitical ramification for Nepal. India and the US will increasingly work in concert to buttress the ‘democratic camp’ in Nepal, and China will try to help the communist government in Kathmandu to resist this pressure. And China could do so with Russia’s help. Were it not for the corona pandemic, Russian President Vladimir Putin could have come to Nepal this year. The Cold War-era bunkers in the Russian Embassy in Kathmandu await a new round of China-Russia tête-à-tête.

There is a remarkable coherence between the foreign policy outlooks of Moscow and Beijing, considering their troubled borders and centuries-old enmity. At the moment, the two regional behemoths reckon they have no option but to together push back against the new American designs in Eurasia. They are thus ready to bury the old hatchet. RT, the state-controlled Russian television, is these days dominated by discussions where participants heap praises on China for standing up to ‘American imperialism’ and for coming to the medical help of the likes of Italy and Spain, while the US, the supposed friend of these European countries, had nothing to offer.

The Chinese press has likewise been busy chastising Washington for its supposed failure to save the lives of its own people even while it pushes ‘criminal’, corona-enabling sanctions against Iran and Venezuela. And there are only good words for Russia in the Chinese press. China’s recent military maneuvers in the South China Sea, meanwhile, shows that it is intent on preserving its primacy in the neighborhood, corona or no corona.

When I asked an old China hand in Nepal how the corona crisis would change Nepali geopolitics, pat came his reply: “There is now a clear case for closing the open Nepal-India border. The corona pandemic has clarified that the open border is a danger to our sovereignty.” Such voices will get stronger in the days ahead, and they will find plenty of ears in the Oli government.

Many think the prospect of Russia and China working together to secure their geopolitical interests in South Asia is fanciful. But as the Americans get more and more assertive here, it is only natural for the two to pool their resources to fight against this ‘American hegemony’. In the long run, the curse of geography forces Russia and China apart. But for the time being the calculations of individual strongmen like Xi and Putin will prevail.