While Wang Yi’s India visit and PM Modi’s upcoming China visit may signal a degree of creeping normalcy at the bilateral level, Beijing’s expanding footprint in South Asia is set to intensify regional competition, requiring careful assessment of its implications for the overall India-China relationship
Over the past decade, India’s strategic landscape has grown increasingly complex. Beijing has not diluted its consistent strategy of constraining India. Whether through deepening ties with Pakistan, or expanding influence in India’s periphery, China’s approach remains adversarial. Beijing’s assertive regional posture underscores the urgency for India to rethink both its economic and security policies.
What began with a coup in 2021 has devolved into a theater for China’s energy security, India’s border anxieties, Russia’s arms sales, and America’s China strategy. Each external actor pursues its narrow interests; none has the incentive to restore genuine stability. The losers, inevitably, are Myanmar’s people.
Chinese emperors, especially those of the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty, recognized that control over Tibetan Buddhism offered a powerful form of soft power. By leveraging religious authority, they could exert indirect political influence over Buddhist populations beyond China's borders.
Given the growing power differentials and China’s global hegemonic ambitions, it is observed that Xi attends mega events where his country has some clout and skips those that could put China in a tight spot and raise questions related to its accountability and responsibility.
India is increasingly being courted by the US-led West as a bulwark to Beijing, and China will want to send a two-pronged message to Delhi and Washington as well as regional neighbours that Beijing still holds the economic and security upper hand, although its economic credentials have taken a serious hit.
Facing encroaching Chinese naval presence and power projections in the Pacific Island states on its eastern flank, and an assertive bid by Beijing to challenge the naval presence of Delhi and Washington in the Indian Ocean to its western flank, Australia is faced with its highest threat level in decades.
In the last decade, one has observed repeated and serious attempts by Chinese research vessels to collect data in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). The year 2018, saw 24 research cruises by Chinese vessels in the IOR, whereas during the same period six other nations, including US, India, France and others, have undertaken only 26 such cruises in the IOR.
Indian media may do any amount of spin doctoring, including claiming that the bilateral meeting was requested by the Chinese side, but the noteworthy issue is that none of the two Chinese statements mention disengagement and de-escalation.
The influence of China and its grip on the region remain a predominant factor that has divided ASEAN. One-sided economic dependence on Beijing and the fear of inciting its potential wrath and economic retaliation and potential hard-power measures have stymied the full capacity of the region in managing regional power parity.
Maritime security and stability remain of utmost importance to both Brunei and Malaysia, and Brunei has enhanced its preparedness in this regard by joining the Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) maritime exercise with the US.
This gradual decline of the environment - with disastrous consequences for the region including northeastern India and Bangladesh - cannot be arrested without the cooperation of the military rulers who are neck-deep in corruption and self-aggrandizement.
The growing maritime competition between China and Japan along with the West will result in the growing militarization of the Indo-Pacific.
The Indian Navy remains a highly trained, disciplined and proficient force that has stepped up cooperation with other navies in the Indo-Pacific through the annual Malabar exercises. India’s naval modernisation are a strategic response to Beijing’s muscle-flexing in the region, including in the Indian Ocean, especially with Beijing’s strategic penetration into India’s neighbours Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh through the 'strings of pearls' encirclement with its wider regional ramifications.
Thus, China views PM Modi’s visit to the US as a gathering storm for its ambitions to dominate Asia in military, economic and technological spheres. That these are due to China’s recent political and strategic choices is ignored.
Bangladesh expressed its commitment to walk alongside Japan, a leading creator of the QUAD alliance in the Indo-Pacific strategy, for the sake of a peaceful Indo-Pacific region.
Unlike in the Indo-Pacific region, where China poses a security issue for India and US, the challenge in the Middle East is from Beijing’s subtle economic and political push through its Belt and Road Initiative.
Japan now wants to provide its leadership role in the region for the Western world. Washington, which was so long seeking to counter China through India, has now turned to Japan as it felt that New Delhi was not living up to that role.
ASEAN remains ill-equipped to handle the fallout from the tensions in the South China Sea or the potentiality of a full-blown Taiwanese conflict.
