OPINION: Modi must guard against China's kiss of death while meeting Xi

It is believed that if a Mafia leader kisses you, you are marked for death (as in Godfather 2).

So also, if a Chinese leader approaches you, you should be sure it is with some evil design. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday in Chennai, and I would advise the Indian leader to be vigilant. Why do I say this?

To understand the political situation in the world today, one must have some idea of economics, for, as Lenin said, politics is concentrated economics.

Today, China has foreign exchange reserves of over $3.2 trillion. This is a huge amount of hot money hungrily looking for investment avenues. The truth is that after Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and accession to supreme power of Deng Xiaoping, China is not a communist country—it is capitalist. And it is in the nature of capital that after a certain stage of development, a country becomes imperialist, that is it seeks avenues for overseas investment, markets, raw materials and cheap labour. For this, it becomes aggressive and expansionist, like Britain and France in the 19th century.

However, in the 1930s and 1940s, the main danger for the world was not British or French imperialism: It was the imperialism of Hitler's Germany. That was because at that time, German imperialism was an aggressive and expansionary imperialism, while British and French imperialism was on the defensive. In other words, while the latter only wanted to hold on to their colonies without seeking more, Germany wanted to conquer and enslave other countries. So Hitler's Germany was the greatest danger to world peace at that time.

Today, China is the greatest danger to world peace, not the US or any other country. This is because in pursuit of avenues for profitable investment, markets, raw materials and others, China has become virulently aggressive and expansionist (though their expansionism is not yet militaristic, but economic).

As pointed out in my article Trump's opposition to Chinese imperialism overshadows his defects, published in a news website, today, the Chinese have expanded everywhere, penetrating Asia, Africa and Latin America (where the Monroe Doctrine has been cast to the winds by the Chinese), apart from their capture of markets of Western countries. China's Belt and Road Initiative is only one of Beijing's moves. China has 'captured' ports (e.g., Gwadar port in Pakistan), infrastructure and other facilities of many countries, as stated in my previous article.

The 'kiss of death' seems to have been given to Pakistan by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and huge Chinese investments in Pakistan, which are nothing but a sugar-coated poison pill, as noted by Panos Mourdoukoutas, professor of economics at Long Island University, New York, in his article What is China doing to Pakistan? The same thing it did to Sri Lanka.

In other words, Pakistan will soon be riddled with debt it will owe to China, and become a Chinese semi-colony.

One can only hope that in the Xi-Modi meeting in Chennai, a kiss of death is not given to India too.

I submit that all the countries in the world must now realise the Chinese danger to the whole world, as Winston Churchill understood about the Nazi danger, and put up stout opposition to China's imperialism, instead of behaving like Neville Chamberlain, who thought an appeasement policy could bring peace.

Justice Markandey Katju retired from the Supreme Court in 2011

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK