China's forays into the Indian Ocean: strategic implications for India

Abstract

Analyses of China's Indian Ocean forays have been sporadic, seasonal, and restricted. Often, these are triggered by and remain limited to reporting new assets and technologies in China's naval modernisation and fail to appreciate their larger vision, deeper stimuli and also their complex linkages to China's political compulsions, economic motives and social moorings. Even at the most visible level, the survival of China's communist regime remains premised not on its military modernisation but on continued smooth trade-led development that needs assured access to and safety of sea lanes and unlimited markets and resources. The naval component of China's Indian Ocean policy, therefore, needs to be put in perspective and these analyses need to explore China's forays into the Indian Ocean in terms of its larger and concerted initiatives in building a maritime infrastructure both across the Indian Ocean littoral and also in expanding its ocean-faring and ocean-exploring claims and capabilities. What is also necessary to appreciate is how, in the face of new threats of maritime terrorism and the expanding US presence on China's periphery, China feels not only isolated but even targeted. All of this makes China far more assertive in accessing the Indian Ocean with obvious implications for its neighbours especially peer-powers like India that share several of China's proclivities. India, however, must carefully sidestep from falling prey to popular binaries of friend-or-foe formulations and focus not just on narrower and surface level trends in China's naval build-up, but expand its appreciation and engage China across the whole spectrum of maritime sectors and thereby maximise mutual benefits and lasting stable maritime equations with China.

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