Cheap labour helped Bangladesh cross half a trillion dollars in FY26. The next half trillion will have to come from better-paid, more productive workers and from firms able to pay them. That transition has to begin while the window is still open.
Before extending BIG-B to India, outstanding bilateral issues must be addressed through meaningful dialogue and mutually acceptable arrangements. We must not grant strategic advantages first and hope for reciprocal cooperation later.
China has sketched a hull that sails the world's oceans for years at a time without taking on a single drop of it. The ship that never stops for gas. And the ship that never refuels is a ship that can never be cut off at a choke point.
A genuine win-win partnership should create employment for Bangladeshis, strengthen Bangladeshi enterprises and build local capacity while providing Chinese businesses with opportunities in a growing market.
When Global South outlets amplify that framing without question, they become complicit in a propaganda architecture they did not build and do not control.
China can simply keep enough doors open for Iran to survive and enough alternatives available for other Middle Eastern states to avoid choosing the US alone.
China leads in AI publication volume, citations, patent output and industrial robot installations, while the US retains advantages in notable model development, high-impact patents and investment.
Engagement with China is presented as proof of resistance against Western dominance. Good relations with India become synonymous with regional stability. Foreign policy becomes a performance of political identity rather than a framework for advancing long-term national interests.
There is the India-shaped hole in the map. By excluding New Delhi, Beijing has made the corridor more diplomatically tractable, but it has also converted an economic connectivity project into a more explicit piece of the China-India strategic contest in the Bay of Bengal.
This history matters for one simple reason -- the corridor China proposed in Beijing in June to the Bangladeshi Prime Minister is the same idea, with the same starting point in Kunming, with the same logic, but without India.
This is not a government choosing China over India, or East Asia over the West. Rather, Dhaka is trying to keep every door open for as long as the money keeps coming in and as long as no single lender or ally claims it exclusively.
The tragedy in Myanmar will not stop, the junta rules a hollow state, the rebels hold territory but don’t have a future vision moving forward.
Kim is no longer the supplicant figure of earlier years. He bargains now. He postures. He makes patrons come to him.
Tarique Rahman’s expected Malaysia-China sequence is a necessary correction to an India-centric past. Malaysia gives the visit diplomatic balance and China gives it strategic weight. But the correction will only succeed if it produces a wider foreign-policy basket without chipping away at Bangladesh’s sovereign decision-making space.
The Chinese leaders learned it well, as was evident in his call to Mr. Trump in the opening remarks of Chinese Premier Mr. Xi Jinping, who urged him to avoid falling into the Thucydides trap and embrace peace for global prosperity. But at the close of the talk, the disturbing global concerns may be: is there a second Kissinger, or a President like Nixon, to achieve the same?
In this environment, terms like “deep state conspiracy,” “foreign funding,” etc provide a ready‑made vocabulary for dismissing the July uprising as manufactured rather than acknowledging the real anger that drove it.
