Table of Contents
India and China are the two rising giants of Asia. How they relate once they become powerful will have a significant impact on Asian security. At present, their relationship is ambivalent, with growing people-to-people contacts and rapidly expanding trade, but also abiding strategic suspicion, especially on the part of India.
This chapter seeks to assess the future of the relationship. To do so, it needs to answer three questions. First, will China and India rise equally enough so that they will balance each other’s rise? Second, if they do not rise equally and China continues to pull ahead economically and militarily, will this mean that they can remain on relatively benign terms, or will India perforce seek to balance China’s rise, and if so, what will this balance look like and how will it shape Asian security? And third, what role, if any, will the United States play in that balance and how might India–US relations evolve in light of a rising China?
In order to fully understand the world in which China and India are likely to rise to power we will also need to gain an insight into the likely evolution of Sino–US relations. Should there be a benign evolution of relations between the United States and China capable of absorbing China’s rise into a stable global system, this would likely trump any developments between China and India in terms of the wider Asian order. It would do so because it would go at least some way towards shaping the basic relationship between China and India in positive directions. And, in any case, Sino–Indian tension would not necessarily be powerful enough in itself to dictate the nature of Asian security.
Be that as it may, the Sino–US relationship is a matter others are better equipped than this author to deal with. It is also an issue dealt with elsewhere in this volume. So we will set it aside for the purposes of this chapter. It means, however, that there is an assumption in what we say that China and the United States will remain wary competitors and that China will not necessarily bed down easily as a positive player in Asian security, independently of any bilateral developments with India.