This book examines the role of China in driving and sustaining India’s post-Cold War engagement with Southeast Asia. In doing so, it provides a unique insight into the regional dimensions of the Sino-Indian relationship. India launched its Look East Policy in the early 1990s as part of a concerted effort to revive the importance of Southeast Asia in the country’s foreign policy agenda. This study assesses the role of the China factor – defined here as China’s regional role, which has been interpreted through the prism of the Sino-Indian relationship – in the inception and evolution of the policy. More specifically, it establishes the extent to which China has been raised as a priority in discourses of India’s Look East Policy and how this has varied over time from the origins of the policy through to the most recent phase of the renamed Act East Policy. Addressing the distinction between what policymakers signal in their official statements and their true or underlying motivations, the book alludes to the fact that government officials may not always reflect true intentions in their official statements, and it is often what is not said that may reveal more about their real motivations. This is particularly relevant in the context of the Sino-Indian relationship where diplomatic rhetoric often masks more competitive and confrontational aspects of the bilateral relationship. An important analysis of the interplay between India’s relations with Southeast Asia and China, this book will be of interest to academics, policymakers and students in the fields of International Relations, Asian Security, Southeast Asian politics, and in particular, Indian foreign policy, the Sino-Indian relationship, and India’s Look East/Act East Policy.

The 2021 edition of the Outlook addresses reallocation of resources to digitalisation in response to COVID-19, with special focuses on health, education and Industry 4.0. During the COVID-19 crisis, digitalisation has proved critical to ensuring the continuity of essential services.

This book examines the emerging maritime security scene in Southeast Asia. It considers highly topical implications for the region of possible strategic competition between China and India - the rising naval powers of Asia - with a possible naval "arms race" emerging between these countries both with naval force development and operations. As part of its "Look East" policy, India has deployed naval units to the Pacific Ocean for port visits and exercises both with East Asian navies and the US Navy, but India is also concerned about the possibility of the Chinese Navy operating in the Indian Ocean. Even as the US-India defence relationship continues to deepen, the US and China are struggling to build a closer links. China’s and India’s strategic interests overlap in this region both in maritime strategic competition or conflict – which might be played out in the Bay of Bengal, the Malacca and Singapore Straits and the South China Sea. The sea lines of communication (SLOCs) through Southeast Asian waters constitute vital "choke points" between the Indian and Pacific Oceans carrying essential energy supplies for China and other Northeast Asian countries. Any strategic competition between China and India has implications for other major maritime players in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, especially Australia, the Republic of Korea and Japan, as well as the US. This book identifies possible cooperative and confidence-building measures that may contribute to enhanced relations between these two major powers and dampen down the risks associated with their strategic competition.

This volume will explore the role of India and China in regional geopolitics, with a focus on Southeast Asia. It highlights some of the key events and turning points in the evolving equations since the times of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister. In six chapters, it shows how Indias prominent position in devising the regional architecture in Asia was diluted after the Bandung era, especially after the Indo-China war in 1962. The author maintains that, relative to its earlier status as a major champion of Asian regionalism, India had become a political and diplomatic non-entity, if not a pariah, in Southeast Asia by the 1980s. While China emerged as the most important political entity in the region over the next three decades, India gradually made substantial inroads into the ASEAN scene, more so after its emergence as a 'rising' power in the post-Cold War era and economic reforms of 1991. 00This book revisits the question of contemporary Asian security from an Indian vantage point, posing critical questions about the future of regional leadership in Southeast Asia, and demonstrating how it depends as much on the India-China-Southeast Asia relationship as on China-US-Japan relations.

Maritime power has been a key defining parameter of economic vitality and geostrategic power of nations. This book explores how the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the rise of China and India as confident economic powers pivoting on high growth rates, exponential expansion of science, technology and industrial growth.

Will the nations of Southeast Asia maintain their strategic autonomy, or are they destined to become a subservient periphery of China? This book’s expert authors address this pressing question in multiple contexts. What clues to the future lie in the modern history of Sino-Southeast Asian relations? How economically dependent on China has the region already become? What do Southeast Asians think of China? Does Beijing view the region in proprietary terms as its own backyard? How has the relative absence, distance, and indifference of the United States affected the balance of influence between the US and China in Southeast Asia? The book also explores China’s moves and Southeast Asia’s responses to them. Does China’s Maritime Silk Road through Southeast Asia herald a Pax Sinica across the region? How should China’s expansionary acts in the South China Sea be understood? How have Southeast Asian states such as Vietnam and the Philippines responded? How does Singapore’s China strategy compare with Indonesia’s? How relevant is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? To what extent has China tried to persuade the “overseas Chinese” in Southeast Asia to identify with “'the motherland” and support its aims? How are China’s deep involvements in Cambodia and Laos affecting the economies and policies of those countries? “This rich collection,” writes renowned author-journalist Nayan Chanda, answers these and other questions while offering “fresh insights” and “new information and analyses” to explain Southeast Asia’s relations with China.