China and India drawing closer

Bloomberg.com:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an accord aimed at ending their decades-old border dispute and agreed to explore the possibility of creating the world's biggest free trade zone.

I suppose from a real-politic perspective this would seem to be bad news, China is a strategic competitor of ours and their political system is fundamentally opposed to freedom and democracy. This settlement, and a subsequent free trade agreement will of course strengthen China and make them more powerful. I think it is a very good thing though. The very nature of such agreements is, in the end, antithetical to the Chinese method of governance. It will, probably slowly, force reform on China. This will strengthen a tendancy that has been going on for a long time. So, it will make a (potential) enemy stronger, but it will make that country much less of an enemy. A very good thing in my opinion.