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PALGRAVE SERIES IN ASIA AND PACIFIC STUDIES
China and the

Indo-Pacific
Maneuvers and Manifestations
Edited by
Swaran Singh · Reena Marwah
Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies
Honorary Editor
May Tan-Mullins, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo,
China
Series Editor
Filippo Gilardi, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo,
China
Editorial Board
Melissa Shani Brown, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Adam Knee, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, Singapore
Gianluigi Negro, University of Siena, Siena, Italy
Andrea Střelcová, MPIWG, Berlin, Germany
The Asia and Pacific regions, with a population of nearly three billion
people, are of critical importance to global observers, academics, and
citizenry due to their rising influence in the global political economy
as well as traditional and nontraditional security issues. Any changes to
the domestic and regional political, social, economic, and environmental
systems will inevitably have great impacts on global security and gover-
nance structures. At the same time, Asia and the Pacific have also emerged
as a globally influential, trend-setting force in a range of cultural arenas.
The remit of this book series is broadly defined, in terms of topics and
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for both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Published by Palgrave
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UNNC.
NOW INDEXED ON SCOPUS!
Swaran Singh · Reena Marwah
Editors
China
and the Indo-Pacific
Maneuvers and Manifestations
Editors
Swaran Singh Reena Marwah
Jawaharlal Nehru University Jesus and Mary College
New Delhi, India University of Delhi
New Delhi, India
ISSN 2662-7922 ISSN 2662-7930 (electronic)

Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies
ISBN 978-981-19-7520-2 ISBN 978-981-19-7521-9 (eBook)
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Preface
This volume seeks to present both sides of the discourse on Indo-Pacific

geopolitics: the mainstream one—the genesis of which is credited to Japan
but is lately led by the United States and its friends—and also the other
led one by China and only mutely joined together by several recipients
of its largely one-sided trade and investments. Over the years, US-led
narratives in the name of Free and Open Indo-Pacific have seen China
heralding its own vision of a shared destiny of humankind and, at least
indirectly, the Chinese have also begun to engage with the Indo-Pacific
geopolitics. China, however, remains committed to using the term Asia-
Pacific thereby emphasising the continental perspectives of the region.
Both these narratives of the US and China remain located in this
region’s larger drift from the post-World War II geo-strategic US-led
security architecture of hub-and-spokes to post-Cold War geo-economic
realignments making China the largest economic partner for most littoral
nations. No doubt US has also sought to reinforce its economic lead-
ership—from Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation to Trans-Pacific Part-
nership to Indo-Pacific Economic Forum—and China has also made
inroads in the regional security architecture by building of port facilities—
from Djibouti to Hambantota, Gwadar, to Solomon Islands—yet the US
remains the leader in security management while China has emerged as
the locomotive of regional economic growth and epi-centre for regional
production and supply chains.
v
vi PREFACE
The intriguing question that this volume seeks to explore is how China,
the main trigger for this combined growth and change—and therefore
trigger for novel imaginations of this confluence of Pacific and Indian
Ocean—has largely remained an outlier in US-led mainstream Indo-
Pacific geopolitical discourses? This is where contributors of this volume
have sought to deconstruct various conceptual and operative outlines of
both US-led and Chinese narratives to elucidate their overlaps as also their
distinctive core and its drivers. Do these new outlines emanate from the
larger drift from the geo-strategic and geo-economic churning and trans-
formations set in motion by this unprecedented economic rise of China?
Do they also adequately reflect how under President Xi Jinping this
economic prowess has been used by China in cultivating and expanding
its political influence which is today guiding and goading the evolving
future trajectories of the Indo-Pacific geopolitics?
The economic and the security architecture of the Indo-Pacific, mean-
while, appears bifurcating—led respectively by China and the United
States—often witnessing eruptions on issues relating to trade, technology
and Taiwan—which have become all the more complicated by the long-
drawn coronavirus pandemic followed by the Ukraine crisis which have
further sharpened US-China contestations. For the first time since the end
of the Cold War, the epi-centre of global powers competition has clearly
shifted to the Indo-Pacific region igniting a new competition between
China as the new rising power and an established power ie. the United
States; and, where the US-led global order finds itself challenged by a
move towards Pax-Sinica.
It is evident that ‘China centricity’ of global production and supply
chains, reinforced through its state-driven project-based infrastructure-
binge is fast diminishing the erstwhile clout of the US. China’s leaders
have consistently made clear their desire to have their political and
economic models respected. It has been a consistent feature of Chinese
foreign policy to push for deference to its ‘core interests’. The multiple
strands of the Belt and Road Initiative have seen a host of counteracting
responses including its Indo-Pacific narratives and the Quad initiatives
among others; the most recent one being the trilateral grouping of
Australia, the U.K., and the US, viz. the AUKUS. This is where dissecting
their underlying visions and conceptual constructs become critical to
understand their evolving mutual policies and perceptions as also their
global implications.
PREFACE vii
It is in this complex backdrop, that this book seeks to examine the

evolving contours and dimensions of Western imaginations of China as
also China’s own response to various Western multilateral initiatives.
Contributors specifically explicate China’s Indo-Pacific strategies in the
context of the strategies of United States, Japan, ASEAN, European
Union, Australia and India. In the second part they specifically explore
Chinese expositions. Together they seek to reveal how China’s medium-
term strategy envisages a non-hostile external environment in order to
focus on its core interests; how by reducing dependence of littoral nations
of the Indo-Pacific region on the United States it seeks to increase
their engagement with China. China’s expanding economic outreach and
influence across the Indo-Pacific littorals has likewise provided a new
boost to US-led expositions and initiatives which are often seen as being
China-driven thereby inviting intermittent responses from Beijing and this
action-reaction has become increasingly palpable. It calls for a serious
debate to scrutinise China’s vision as also its increasing centrality and
influence in the moulding and unfolding of Indo-Pacific geopolitics.
New Delhi, India Swaran Singh

Reena Marwah
Acknowledgements
This volume titled, China and the Indo-Pacific: Maneuvers and Mani-
festations is an outcome of the two-days International Conference held
in April 2021. Authors’ papers after their Abstracts were selected had
to go through multiple stages of rigorous selection and editing process,
before these were presented within the sub-themes of Conceptualisation
of Multilateralism, Major Powers engagement, China in the Indo-Pacific,
Issues and future trends. Discussants were provided papers in advance
and authors received their oral and written responses The authors were
then required to substantively revise their papers as chapters based on
the comments received from the discussants during the conference as also
comments received from Editors.
At the outset, Editors take this opportunity to thank each of the
conference session chairpersons and discussants, whose valuable inputs
helped to enrich the contributions of the authors. We are particularly
grateful to Dr. E. Sridharan, Prof. Munim Barai, Prof. Nirmal Jindal,
Prof. B.R. Deepak, Prof. Sophana Srichampa, Prof. Lailufar Yasmin, Prof.
Lakhwinder Singh and Prof. Sukhpal Singh for chairing various sessions.
Our thanks are also due to the large number of scholars who partici-
pated in this two-day conference and engaged the presenters with pointed
questions. Conference participants are also acknowledged for their candid
sharing of views.
This volume also acknowledges the perseverance of several authors
whose papers were revised a few times and all of them have contributed to
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
enriching the book. This volume comprising 11 chapters would not have
been possible without the kind cooperation of the production and edito-
rial team of Palgrave Macmillan. Each one deserves our sincere thanks
and appreciation. All research interns of our Association of Asia Scholars,
led by Dr. Silky Kaur were continuously engaged in ensuring the success
of the conference and deserve our appreciation. Finally, we are grateful to
our families for being our constant strength in enabling us to complete
this seminal work.
Prof. Swaran Singh

Prof. Reena Marwah
Praise for China and the Indo-Pacific
“This ground-breaking compendium by a group of scholars - both estab-

lished and emerging - presents a critical deconstructing of both the
conceptual as also operative elements of what appears to be two distinct
narratives; mainstream one led by the United States and a gradually
emerging counter from China’s leaders. Seen from Indian perspectives
it presents useful analysis for India’s policy makers to fathom the ever
evolving trajectories likely to shape the contours of the Indo-Pacific
geopolitics in the coming years.”
—Harsh V Pant, Professor of International Relations, King’s College
London
“At a time of accelerating competition in the Indo-Pacific region, this

is an extremely timely and important contribution. This book brings
together a great and diverse group of excellent scholars to analyze the
rapidly evolving Indo-pacific strategies of all key players in the region
and beyond, with fascinating individual insights. Edited by two renowned
editors, this is a must-read volume to make sense of current geopolitical
dynamics.”
—Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia, Professor of Political
Science and Konwakai Chair in Japanese Research
xi
xii PRAISE FOR CHINA AND THE INDO-PACIFIC
“A brilliant blending of opposing yet determined interrogations compli-

cates the simultaneity of China’s reluctant engagement with narratives of
Indo-Pacific geopolitics aimed at a joint alert to its rise and corresponding
practices of mutual moulding that not only reconfigures major actors but
also entangles China.”
—Chih-yu Shih, Professor of Political Science, National Taiwan
University
“A timely volume with an Excellent Set of Contributions perfectly assem-

bled by the Editors. Useful reading material for libraries, researchers and
policy practitioners to understand the current and future Chinese strate-
gies in Indo-Pacific. The volume presents a balanced and fine overview of
Indo-Pacific, highlighting bilateral and mini-lateral politics.”
—Jagannath Panda, Head, Stockholm Centre for South Asian &
Indo-Pacific Affairs, ISDP, Sweden & Director, Yokosuka Council on
Asia-Pacific Studies (YACPS), Japan
“The United States, some European and Asian countries have issued
strategic documents on the Indo-Pacific, and scholars and politicians from
various countries are paying close attention to China’s response. This
monograph, edited by Prof. Swaran Singh and Prof. Reena Marwah,
brings together the assessment of China’s status and role in the Indo-
Pacific framework by important scholars in the field of international
relations, highlighting the concerns and perceptions of relevant countries
on China. Chinese scholars will be able to gain a better understanding of
the views of the outside world through this book.”
—Prof. Su Hao, China Foreign Affairs University, Beijing
Contents
1 China’s Engagement and the Indo-Pacific 1

Swaran Singh and Reena Marwah
2 Decoding ‘Sovereign Strategic Networks’
in the Indo-Pacific: Contesting China’s
‘Ascendant-Rise’ 21
Dattesh D. Parulekar
3 US–China Strategic Competition: Through
the Matrix of Complex Interdependence 41
Rubina Waseem
4 Sino-Japanese Relations: Drivers and Obstacles
in the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Vision 55
Stephen R. Nagy
5 ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific: Motivations,
Opportunities, and Challenges 75
Don McLain Gill
6 China in EU’s Strategy for Cooperation
in the Indo-Pacific 93
Claudia Astarita
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
7 Evolving Indo-Pacific Multilateralism: China Factor

in Australia’s Perspectives 121
Artyom A. Garin
8 The Community of Shared Futures: China’s Counter
to Indo-Pacific Narratives 145
Devendra Kumar Bishnoi
9 China’s Regional Engagement and Quad: Mapping
Conceptual Dynamics 171
Mrittika Guha Sarkar
10 China’s Engagement with the Pacific Islands 195
Madhura Bane
11 China’s Maneuvers in South Asia 217
Reena Marwah and Abhishek Verma
Index 241
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Prof. Swaran Singh is visiting professor,

Department of Political Science, Univer-
sity of British Columbia (Vancouver) and
Professor and former Chairman of the
Centre for International Politics, Organi-
sation and Disarmament (CIPOD), School
of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University (New Delhi), Fellow, Canadian
Global Affairs Institute (Calgary), Director
India, The Millennium Project’s South
Asia Foresight Network (Washington DC),
Member, Governing Body, Society of Indian
Ocean Studies (New Delhi) and president
of the Association of Asia Scholars (New
Delhi). Prof Singh has been formerly visiting
professor/scholar at Australian National
University (Canberra), Science Po (Bordeaux,
France) University of Peace (Costa Rica),
Peking, Fudan and Xiamen Universities, and
Shanghai Institute of International Studies and
xv
xvi EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Center for Asian Studies (Hong Kong Univer-

sity) in China, Asian Center (University of the
Philippines), and Chuo, Hiroshima and Kyoto
Universities (in Japan), as also Guest Faculty at
Stockholm International Peace Research Insti-
tute (Sweden). He was Academic Consultant
(2003–2007) at Center de Sciences Humaines
(New Delhi), Research Fellow at Institute for
Defence Studies and Analysis (New Delhi).
Prof. Singh has published in the Journal of
International Affairs (Columbia Univer-
sity), Security Challenges (Australian
National University), Journal of Indian
Ocean Region (Perth, Australia), Issues &
Studies (Taiwan National University), African
Security (Institute of Security Studies), BISS
Journal (Dhaka), and several Chinese and
Indian journals. Prof Singh co-edited Multi-
lateralism in the Indo Pacific—Conceptual
and Operational Challenges (Routledge,
2022), Revisiting Gandhi: Legacies for Global
Peace and National Integration (World
Scientific, Singapore, 2021) Corridors of
Engagement (2020), Colonial Legacies And
Contemporary Studies Of China And Chine-
seness: Unlearning Binaries (2020), BCIM
Economic Corridor: Chinese and Indian
Perspectives (2017), Transforming South
Asia: Imperatives for Action (2013); India
and the GCC Countries, Iran and Iraq:
Emerging Security Perspectives (2013), On
China By India: From Civilization to
State (2012), Emerging China: Prospects
for Partnership in Asia (2012), Asia’s
Multilateralism (in Chinese 2012);
Edited China-Pakistan Strategic Coop-
eration: Indian Perspectives (2007)
Co-authored Regionalism in South Asian
Diplomacy (2007) and authored Nuclear
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xvii
Command & Control in Southern Asia:

China, India, Pakistan (2010), China-India
Economic Engagement: Building Mutual
Confidence (2005), China-South Asia: Issues,
Equations, Policies (2003).
Prof. Singh has supervised 32 Ph.D.s and
50+ M.Phil. degrees at JNU and sits on Selec-
tion Committees for faculty recruitment and
on the Editorial Board of various reputed jour-
nals. He regularly writes for Indian and foreign
media, lectures at various prestigious institu-
tions in India and abroad, and regularly appears
on radio and television discussions. Twitter:
@SwaranSinghJNU.
Prof. Reena Marwah (M.Phil., Delhi Univer-

sity; Ph.D., India, International Business) is
Professor at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi
University.
She was an ICSSR Senior Fellow, MHRD,
Govt. of India, affiliated with the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies, New
Delhi from June 2017 to May 2019, during
which her study was on Reimagining India–
Thailand Relations. She has also been on
deputation as Senior Academic Consultant,
ICSSR, Ministry of Human Resource Devel-
opment, Govt. of India for three years (2012–
2015) and continued, on behalf of ICSSR
to coordinate/lead the India-Europe Research
Platform (EqUIP), comprising 10 research
councils of Europe till July 2017. She is
the recipient of several prestigious fellow-
ships including the McNamara fellowship of
the World Bank, 1999–2000 and the Asia
fellowship of the Asian Scholarship Founda-
tion 2002–2003, during which she undertook
research in Thailand and Nepal. She is also
a Senior Fellow of the Institute of National
xviii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Security Studies Sri Lanka (INSSSL). She has

been a Consultant for the World Bank and UN
Women. She is the founding editor of Millen-
nial Asia, a triannual journal on Asian Studies
of the Association of Asia Scholars, published
by Sage Publishers.
During her teaching and research expe-
rience, she has worked closely with several
think tanks, international donors, embassies,
ministries of the Government of India and
research councils in Asia. Among her research
interests are international relations issues of
China, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand and
India, and development issues of South and
South East Asia.
In addition to several chapters and arti-
cles published in books/journals, she is
author/co-author/co-editor of 16 books and
monographs including Contemporary India:
Economy, Society and Polity (Pinnacle 2009,
2011), co-edited volumes including Economic
and Environmental Sustainability of the Asian
Region (Routledge 2010), Emerging China:
Prospects for partnership in Asia (Routledge
2011), On China by India: From a Civi-
lization to a Nation State (Cambria Press,
USA); Transforming South Asia: Imperatives
for Action, (Knowledge World, India) 2014;
The Global Rise of Asian Transformation,
(Palgrave Macmillan) 2014.
Her latest co-edited books are: China
Studies in South and Southeast Asia: Pro-
China, Objectivism, and Balance, (2018)
(World Scientific Publishing Company, Singa-
pore). Revisiting Gandhi: Legacies for Global
Peace and National Integration (World Scien-
tific, Singapore, 2021, Multilateralism in the
Indo Pacific—Conceptual and Operational
Challenges (Routledge, 2022).
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xix
Her most recent authored books are Re-

imagining India Thailand Relations: A multi-
lateral and bilateral perspective, by World
Scientific Publishers, Singapore, published in
March 2020; China’s Economic Footprint in
South and Southeast Asia: A futuristic perspec-
tive, published in 2021, by World Scien-
tific Publishers, Singapore and India-Vietnam
Relations: Development Dynamics and Strategic
Alignment, (2022) published by Springer
Nature.
Contributors
Claudia Astarita is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris and International

Relations Analyst for China and the Indo-Pacific at Indigo Publica-
tion (Paris). She obtained her Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Hong Kong
University in early 2010. Her main research interests include China’s
political and economic development, Chinese and Indian Foreign policies,
East Asian regionalism and regional economic integration, Asian Civil
Society, and the role of media and memory (both official and unofficial)
in reshaping historical narratives in Asia.
Madhura Bane (Ph.D.) Former Coordinator of Post-graduate
Centre, Department of Political Science, Sir Parashurambhau College
(Autonomous), Pune. Former Assistant Professor of Political Science
at the Department of Political Science, Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous
College, Matunga. My academic interests are in International Relations,
India’s Foreign Policy, Political theory and Indian Polity. My chapter on
Climate Change Challenges: A Study of Island States in the Indo-Pacific
is a part of the forthcoming volume with Routledge titled Multilateralism
in the Indo Pacific: Conceptual and Operational Challenges edited by
Swaran Singh and Reena Marwah.
Devendra Kumar Bishnoi has submitted his Ph.D. thesis titled Domestic
Politics and International Order: a Constructivist Analysis of Chinese
Discourses on Territorial Sovereignty for evaluation in the Department
of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana
xx EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
(India). His research focuses on the intersections between domestic poli-

tics and China’s approaches to the international order with particular
focus on the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
and its efforts to remould ideology in the post-Mao period. Earlier, he has
earned his master’s in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad,
and Chinese language training from the English and Foreign Language
University, Hyderabad, and Tsinghua University, Beijing. His current
research focuses on maps circulated in education textbooks, popular
books, and media among other media since the 1940s and their signifi-
cance in understanding Chinese imaginations of its place in the territorial
sovereignty-based international order.
Artyom A. Garin is Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and
Oceania at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the RAS. He is interested in
multilateralism in the Indo-Pacific, as well as in Australia–China relations.
His research interests also include defence and aid policies of Australia, as
well as politics and history of the Pacific Island Countries.
Don McLain Gill is a Philippines-based geopolitical analyst and author
who specialises in Indo-Pacific affairs and India-Southeast Asian relations.
He has over 100 publications to his credit, and he has written in the
form of books, book chapters, peer-reviewed international journal articles,
and analytical commentaries for major international affairs publishers such
as The Diplomat, Asia Times, The National Interest, SCMP, ORF, and
RUSI, among others. Don is also regularly interviewed by international
news tv channels on his views regarding various issues on international
security and geopolitics.
Stephen R. Nagy received his Ph.D. in International Relations/Studies
from Waseda University in 2008. His main affiliation is as a senior asso-
ciate professor at the International Christian University, Tokyo. He is also
a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI); a visiting fellow
with the Japan Institute for International Affairs (JIIA); a senior fellow
at the MacDonald Laurier Institute (MLI); and a senior fellow with the
East Asia Security Centre (EASC). He also serves as the Director of Policy
Studies for the Yokosuka Council of Asia Pacific Studies (YCAPS) spear-
heading their Indo-Pacific Policy Dialogue series. He is currently working
on middle power approaches to great power competition in the Indo-
Pacific. His latest publications include among others, Nagy, S. R. 2022.
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xxi
‘Economic Headwinds and a Chance of Slower Growth: What the fore-

cast holds for the Belt Road Initiative’, MacDonald Laurier Institute.;
Nagy, S. R. 2021. “Sino-Japanese Reactive Diplomacy as seen through
the Interplay of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Free and Open
Indo-Pacific Vision (FOIP)’. China Report: 1–15.
Dattesh D. Parulekar (Ph.D.), is Assistant Professor at the School of
International and Area Studies (SIAS), Goa University. His realms of
specialisation are India’s Foreign Policy, Strategic Maritime Issues in the
Indo-Pacific, African Affairs, India-Europe Cooperation w r.t the Nordics,
and Latin American Political Economy.
Mrittika Guha Sarkar is an SIS Dean’s Awardee and Graduate Assistant
at the School of International Studies (SIS), The American University,
Washington, DC, USA. She is further associated with the Series Editor
for Routledge Studies on Think Asia as an Editorial Assistant. She has
previously been associated with the Chinese Language Center, National
Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan, as a Language Scholar,
and the Centre for East Asian Studies, School of International Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi as a Research Scholar in
Chinese studies. Her area of focus mainly encompasses China’s foreign
policy and strategic affairs. She has also researched India–China relations,
as well as the geostrategic affairs of the Indo-Pacific region, East Asia’s
geopolitics and security affairs, focusing on the regional developments of
Japan and the Korean Peninsula.
Abhishek Verma is a Ph.D. scholar at Diplomacy and Disarmament
(DAD) division, Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disar-
mament (CIPOD), School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University. He has several publications to his credit including a mono-
graph titled ‘China’s Growing Stature and Inherent Conflict: Tracing
Chinese Strategic Thoughts and its Contemporary Behaviour’. He
completed his graduation from Hansraj College, Delhi University and
M.A. in Politics (Specialisation in International Studies) from Jawaharlal
Nehru University.
Rubina Waseem (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor of the Department of
Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Islamabad and a former
Research Scholar at the George Washington University, Washington, DC.
She has written number of research papers and participated in many
national and international conferences to share her research work. She
xxii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
earned her Ph.D. in Strategic Studies and also holds M.Phil. and M.Sc.
degree in Defence and Strategic Studies from Quaid-I-Azam University.
Abbreviations
AAGC Asia-Africa Growth Corridor

ACFTA ASEAN–China Free Trade Area
ADB Asian Development Bank
ADMM ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting
AEC ASEAN Economic Community
AFTA ASEAN Free Trade Area
AIIB Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
AOIP ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific
APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
APT ASEAN Plus Three
ARF ASEAN Regional Forum
ASEAN Association of South East Asian Nations
AUKUS Australia UK US
BBIN Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal
BCIM Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar
BDN Blue Dot Network
BIMSTEC Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic
Co-operation
BRF Belt and Road Forum
BRI Belt and Road Initiative
CAFTA China-ASEAN Free Trade Area
CBMs Confidence-Building Measures
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CECA Comprehensive Economic Co-operation Agreement
CENTO Central Treaty Organisation
CLMV Cambodia Lao PDR Myanmar Vietnam
xxiii
xxiv ABBREVIATIONS
CMEC China Myanmar Economic Corridor

CORPATs Coordinated Patrols
COTRI China Outbound Tourism Research Institute
CPEC China Pakistan Economic Corridor
CPICEDC China-Pacific Islands Countries Economic Development and
Cooperation
CPTPP Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership
CSIS Centre for Strategic and International Studies
DSTO Defence Science and Technology Organisation
EAS East Asia Summit
EU European Union
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
FOIP Free and Open Indo Pacific
FTA Free Trade Agreement
GAME Guidelines for Air Military Encounters
GCI Global Competitiveness Index
GDP Gross Domestic Product
HDI Human Development Index
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPOI Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative
LAWs Lethal Autonomous Weapon systems
MANPADS Man-Portable Air Defense Systems
MDA Market Development Assistance
MEA Ministry of External Affairs
MoU Memorandum of Understanding
MRIA Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport
MSR Maritime Silk Road
OBOR One Belt One Road
OSOWOG One-Sun-One-World-One-Grid
PIC’s Pacific Islands Countries
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PNG Papua New Guinea
PQI Partnership for Quality Infrastructure
PRC People’s Republic of China
QSD Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
RCEP Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
ReCAAP Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and
Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia
RIMPAC Rim of the Asia Pacific
RSCI Resilient Supply Chain Initiative
SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
SCO Shanghai Cooperation Organization
SEATO South East Asia Treaty Organisation
ABBREVIATIONS xxv
SIDS Small Island Developing States

SREB Silk Road Economic Belt
TAC Treaty of Amity and Cooperation
TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership
UNCLOS United Nations Convention on Law of the Seas
WB World Bank
WW2 World War Two
List of Tables
Table 7.1 Australian Defence White Papers (1976–2016) 124

Table 10.1 China’s exports to the select PIC’s 199
Table 10.2 Donors: a comparative assessment 201
Table 10.3 China’s Aid in USD million (spent) on Pacific Islands
in 2009 and 2019 205
Table 10.4 Taiwan’s Aid in USD million (spent) on Pacific Islands
in 2009 and 2019 206
Table 11.1 South Asian countries: GDP, Debt, HDI, 2022 223
Table 11.2 Chinese debt as a percentage of total debt of South
Asian countries 224
Table 11.3 Chinese projects in Pakistan and Nepal 228
Table 11.4 Chinese projects in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Maldives 231
xxvii
CHAPTER 1
China’s Engagement and the Indo-Pacific
Swaran Singh and Reena Marwah
Introduction
The year 2021 closed with China finally officially taking its first step
towards accepting, engaging, and endorsing the phrase ‘Indo-Pacific’ that
it had been fighting shy; choosing instead to stay on with the older
‘Asia–Pacific’ terminology of yesteryears. The occasion was the special
virtual summit to commemorate the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-China
Dialogue relations where President Xi Jinping’s speech read: ‘We seek
high-quality Belt and Road cooperation with ASEAN and cooperation
between the Belt and Road Initiative and the ASEAN Outlook on the
Indo-Pacific’ (emphasis added) (Xi 2021: 5). The Joint Statement that
S. Singh
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
e-mail: ssingh@jnu.ac.in
R. Marwah (B)
Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
e-mail: rmarwah@jmc.du.ac.in
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
S. Singh and R. Marwah (eds.), China and the Indo-Pacific,
Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7521-9_1
2 S. SINGH AND R. MARWAH
followed appeared a bit cautious clarifying China’s limited endorsement:

‘Reaffirming the principles of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific
(AOIP), while recognising that it is ASEAN’s independent initiative,
being open and inclusive, is intended to enhance ASEAN’s Community
building process, and is not aimed at creating any new mechanism or
replacing existing ones’ (MoFA 2021). At the follow-up press briefing,
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson was even more restrained reiter-
ating China’s long-held position saying: ‘China always supports ASEAN
centrality in the regional architecture, and supports ASEAN playing a
bigger role in regional and international affairs’ (Verma 2022). However,
on being asked a specific question MoFA spokesperson acknowledged
India’s vision of the Indo-Pacific, placing on record that ‘China has noted
India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative’ (ibid.).
While staying on with the ‘Asia–Pacific’ terminology, China has since
evolved a larger vision for the region that is outlined in its building
of a shared community of humankind which blends almost seamlessly
with ASEAN’s community building initiatives. Indeed, like most stake-
holders of the Indo-Pacific geopolitics, China remains committed to the
principle of ‘ASEAN centrality’ and Beijing seems now finally ready to
open its innings of directly engaging with these Indo-Pacific geopolit-
ical narratives. The pace and direction of this engagement, of course, will
remain hostage to China’s overall equations with the United States and
its imaginations of the Indo-Pacific strategy that Beijing views as aimed
at China’s containment and thereby reinforces US predominance. The
US-China trade and technology wars of recent years provide the most
apt evidence of such a prognosis. As recent as in July 2021, China’s
foreign minister Wang Yi had described the US Indo-Pacific strategy
as a come-back of Cold War mentality warning that ‘Revisiting the old
dream of Cold War hegemony cannot win the future, let alone “rebuild
a better world”’ (Xinhua 2021). Likewise in 2018, Wang Yi had first
demolished US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as ‘Sea foam’ that will
dissipate but then by 2020 called it an Asian NATO and condemned US
Indo-Pacific strategy being aimed at reviving ‘Cold War mentality and to
stir up confrontation amongst different groups and blocks and to stoke
geopolitical competition’ (Hu and Meng 2020: 145; Rej 2020).
It is pertinent to begin by asking what has triggered this change of
heart in Beijing? What have been the drivers and direction of China
engagement with the ASEAN Outlook on Indo-Pacific (AOIP) or of its
growing recognition of India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI)?
1 CHINA’S ENGAGEMENT AND THE INDO-PACIFIC 3
What are the likely trajectories of China’s engagement with the new
Indo-Pacific alignments? It is in this complex and evolving backdrop
of blurring contours of their mutual containment and engagement—
or congagement—that this volume seeks to explore both China’s own
forward movement from its extensive economic partnerships with the
Indo-Pacific littoral to engaging with emerging Indo-Pacific political and
strategic narratives as also the engagement of China by various stake-
holders in this evolving Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Either way, it has become
increasingly impossible to ignore China’s presence and influence in the
Indo-Pacific region which calls for a serious examination of its vision and
engagements with this region.
The China-Led Transition of Asia–Pacific

At the very outset, China’s extraordinary economic rise since the early
1990s has unleashed China multifaceted external engagements thereby
unfolding novel visions about its past glory as the ‘Middle Kingdom’ of
the yore. This has also fired desires to reclaim its due place in the world
leading to solidifying of its resolve to raise its global power profile. Succes-
sive Chinese leaders have since aspired to transform China into a world
power with fuguo qiang hing (economic prosperity, strong military) and
from early 2000s they have felt confident of having realised these twin
objectives (Mitter 2020: 219; Li 2013: 57). Beijing summer Olympics
of 2008 under President Hu Jintao are generally cited as marking that
inflection point in China’s coming out from Deng Xiaoping’s ‘hide
your strengths, bide your time’ axiom creating grounds for President Xi
Jinping’s ‘New Era’ and China’s emergence as a full-spectrum regional
power (Grix et al. 2019: 69; Heydarian 2014). Especially, since the
coming of President Xi Jinping to power, China has undergone a radical
shift in signalling its willingness to shape the regional and even global
order (Wu 2018: 996–997). Especially, the last two years of pandemic
coinciding with president Xi’s drive towards his third term as Party
General Secretary and President have begun unfolding a more assertive
China, especially in its immediate region.
President Xi’s focus on consolidating his own and Party’s centrality
through anti-graft campaigns during his first term in office followed by his
focus on innovation and through his unique benchmarks like the Centen-
nial Goals, China Dream, Belt and Road Initiatives juxtaposed with
China’s military modernisation and an increasingly assertive ‘wolf warrior’
diplomacy have sent aftershocks across China’s periphery and amongst its
peer competitors (Mladenov 2021: 62, 122, 344, 462). Indeed, starting
from the East Asian financial crisis of 1997, China emerged as a great
friend and economic partner of the Association of South East Asian
Nations that was originally created in 1960s to contain Communist China
spreading its ideology to other countries of the Asia–Pacific (Yahuda
2004: 295, 333). And then, the global economic slowdown from 2008
was to see Beijing engender closer partnerships even with major US allies
like Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea making the United States
aware of its changing equations in global politics (Yang and Seng 2010:
34). Finally, since 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated
the process of a relative rise of China catching up with the United States
in various indices of influence: for the year 2021, China was the only one
among major economies to show positive growth of 2.6 per cent thus
further closing the gap as the second largest economy in the world (Day
and Xuanmin 2022; Hale and Yu 2022).
This economic rise of China has gradually unfolded China’s political
and strategic vision and its overtones resulting in China and the United
States frequently contesting for influence among various small and middle
powers in the Indo-Pacific. This is what has since triggered efforts by both
sides to unfold their respective novel conceptualisations for building a new
regional order in the Indo-Pacific and these reflect strong divergences
with serious implications for regional security, stability and prosperity.
While the United States, starting from President Barrack Obama’s ‘pivot’
to Asia has heralded narratives of the Indo-Pacific geopolitics, China has
since President Hu Jintao promoted the vision of building a China-led
harmonious world. This has been further fine-tuned under President Xi
Jinping into building a community of shared future of humankind at the
conceptual level and his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to operationalise
that novel vision and perspective. China’s BRI engagement reaching out
to over 130 countries has not just enabled its recent forays around the
world to support the fight against the coronavirus pandemic but saw
it simultaneously supporting (read leading) the ASEAN-led Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which promises to align
the economic alignments of 15 nations of the Indo-Pacific accounting for
over 30 per cent of global GDP. It is important to underline how India,
feeling sidelined by China, had distanced itself from RCEP negotiations
at the very last minute.
The RCEP comprises 15 countries, including the ten ASEAN nations

as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Langhammer, former vice president of the Kiel Institute for the World
Economy, asserted that the benefits of RCEP would be uneven and
it would be most advantageous for China (Martin 2021). Over the
past decade China has also been taking measures to internationalise the
Renminbi (RMB), with the objective that over the long run, the curren-
cies of its trading partners become pegged to the RMB. The fact that
China is the largest trading partner of over 120 countries, there is an
endeavour to ensure that the RMB is established as an important reserve
currency of the foreign central markets (Marwah and Ramanayake 2021:
25).
Xi Jinping’s visualisation of the ‘China Dream’ through BRI is without
a parallel in history; encompassing increasingly numbers of smaller nations
in its enfold. This penchant for expanding its influence is supported
by China emerging as the world’s most powerful supplier of manufac-
tured good and physical infrastructure (Marwah and Ramanayake 2021:
8). In contrast, Trump’s ‘America First’ policy was seen in the United
States abandoning its world leadership including Trans-Pacific Partner-
ship thereby conceding space for China which increasingly dominates
multilateral trade arrangements in Asia. In the realm of security as well,
the post-2017 revitalised Quad 2.0, a grouping of four democracies, has
since seen its agenda traversing less on elements like security cooperation
and naval exercises and much more on sectors like vaccine diplomacy,
climate change, critical technology, cyberspace, capacity building and so
on. The United States and its allies have since taken refuge in framing
and promoting a normative agenda including transparency in decision-
making, quality regulations, standards and rule-based international system
as the basis of their cooperation with all the relevant stakeholders in the
Indo-Pacific region through non-military measures (Marwah and Yasmin
2021: 11).
Evidently, as a rising power, China is not without its own normative
formulations and conceptual push-backs to US-led Indo-Pacific narra-
tives. These have indeed gradually gained traction and are strongly backed
by China’s economic partnership across these littoral nations of the Indo-
Pacific. To begin with, ASEAN’s unwillingness or inability to stand up
against China’s virtual annexation of the South China Sea provides its
most apt example where both China’s artificial island building and grey
zone operations have gone uncontested by all other claimant nations of
the ASEAN (Singh and Yamamoto 2016: 2). The Indian Ocean is another
strategic maritime space that has witnessed China’s increasing footprint
with implications (Singh 2011: 245). Under President Xi Jinping, China
has demonstrated great agility in undertaking various tactical initiatives to
overcome what President Hu Jintao had called China’s ‘Malacca dilemma’
(Mohan 2012: 119–121). If anything, China’s expanding trade and
investments across the Pacific and Indian Oceans littoral have transformed
Malacca Straits from a choke point into a bridge-triggering imagination of
the confluence of these two maritime regions into Indo-Pacific paradigm
(Borah 2022: 131). It is interesting to see how China, an integrator, has
so far remained an outlier in the US-led Indo-Pacific narratives. This of
course has been the result of both US attempts to visualise Indo-Pacific
strategies to contain and counter China’s rise as well as a result of Beijing’s
own consciousness of not encouraging this visualisation and expose itself
in its sensitive maritime region, the South China Sea; not at least until it
has consolidated its complete control on this region.
Does this indirect but growing interest and engagement of China
with the Indo-Pacific reflect its consolidation of South China Sea and
its equations with ASEAN and other US allies in its periphery? What
could be the measurable benchmarks to establish China’s equation with
the Indo-Pacific to facilitate serious explorations into its likely nature,
pace and future trajectories. The February 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy
of the United States, that describes China as one that ‘seeks to become
the world’s most influential power’ calls for ‘collective effort’ to ‘not to
change the PRC but’ seek ‘to manage competition with the PRC’ thereby
‘building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favourable
to the United States (The White House 2022: 5). This sounds like a
climb down from the 2019 US Indo-Pacific Strategy of President Donald
Trump that talked of China’s continued ‘economic and military ascen-
dence’ that ‘seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and,
ultimately global preeminence in the long-term’ had recommended to
‘enhance our posture and presence… to ensure that the rule of law—not
coercion and force—dictates the future of the Indo-Pacific’ (The Depart-
ment of Defence 2019: 8). Can this be seen as a shift guided by the
pandemic experience along with propitious exit from Afghanistan leading
to US failure to stand up to Russia in Ukraine? Or is this a consequence of
increasing recognition of China’s incremental expanding footprint across
the region where China’s trade and investments had received a boost
from its relatively better economic performance during the pandemic?
That would be one way of explaining President Xi’s engaging ‘ASEAN

Outlook on the Indo-Pacific’ as the first mechanism to explore China’s
direct engagement with various US-led Indo-Pacific narratives.
China’s Engagement by Other Stakeholders

China’s relentless drive of economic diplomacy—especially its so-called
cheque book diplomacy that has become noticeable under its Belt and
Road Initiative since 2013—have revealed China’s fast-paced trade and
investment-driven engagement by various stakeholders of the Indo-
Pacific. Surely, China has been welcomed and facilitated by all these
recipient nations big and small alike. To begin with, China’s role in the
East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s had transformed the equa-
tions between Beijing and ASEAN leadership. Ever since, a whole range
of littoral nations of the larger Indo-Pacific littoral has seen China emerge
as their largest trading partner and fastest-growing investor. This two-way
economic engagement has also brought to light a diverse range of multi-
hued perspectives about China’s aims, ambitions and ambiguities that
underline its approaches to multilateralism, wrapped in unique one-sided
bilateral trade and investments around the Indo-Pacific as also with most
other extra-territorial stakeholders of the Indo-Pacific. While the smaller
economies among these justify their engagement as part of exploring to
benefit from China’s unprecedented economic rise, major powers have
done the same but from the perspective of restraining and socialising
Beijing into the preexisting norms and codes of inter-state behaviour. But
without this cooperation of its partners across the Indo-Pacific, China
could not emerge as a force to reckon with.
To begin with the ASEAN—which was originally promoted by the
United States to contain the spread of communism in the Asia–Pacific
region and today stands universally recognised for its ‘centrality’ to all of
the Indo-Pacific narratives—has China as its largest trading partner since
2019 (Fung 2022). Likewise, China has come to be the largest investor
in ASEAN, and fourth largest investor when experts count Hong Kong as
a separate investor that again stands at second position after the United
States (Fung 2022). Likewise, in the year 2019, ASEAN also overtook
the European Union to become China’s largest trading partner and this
happened ten years after China had surpassed both the United States and
European Union to become ASEAN’s largest trading partner. Likewise,
with its continuing political tensions around the Senkaku islands, Japan’s
exports to China for 2021 reached $206 billion compared to China’s

exports to Japan being $165 billion and the year 2020 saw Japan invest
$3.4 billion in China compared to China investing $0.5billion in Japan
(MoFA 2022). This, was when Japanese defence minister, Nobuo Kishi,
claimed China violating Japan’s airspace 722 times for last year—which,
he said, were 260 more than the year before (Feng 2022). Similarly, even
in the face of rather acrimonious relations for last several years, Australia’s
exports to China between 2016—when the two had signed their Free
Trade Agreement—and 2021 have moved up from $60 billion to $135
billion making China a destination for Canberra’s 31% of total exports
and taking their two-way trade to $184 billion (DFAT 2022).
The same is true with India which has seen enduring border tensions
since early 2020 and yet their bilateral trade, (in spite of India’s banning
of 272 China-linked mobile application), rose by 41 per cent to reach
USD 125.7 billion for 2021 (Singh 2022). Nevertheless, it is also true
that the last several years of acrimonious China–Australia ties are believed
to have pushed the latter into closer economic engagement with India
including their signing a long-awaited trade pact (Ramesh 2022). The
most important has been the continuing story of US-China trade and
technology wars since the early years of Donald Trump administration
and yet Chinese media reported their trade rising by 28.7 per cent to
reach $755.6 billion for 2021 (Global Times 2022). The same is the case
with European Union that indeed crossed China’s trade with the United
States to reach $777 billion for 2021 (Free Press 2022).
Chinese interest in the Pacific is growing and this is evident with the
signing of a security pact with the Solomon Islands in April 2022. This has
resulted in the contest for influence on the island nations becoming even
more sharp. The success of the pact was followed by an eight-country tour
of the region by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in May 2022, seeking
other security agreements. Except for a few minor deals, the island nations
resisted going the way of the Solomom Islands, resisting any overture to
be enveloped within the big powers’ geopolitical contest (The Economist
2022).
It is this continuing intertwining of China’s $6 trillion plus world trade
along with its $1 trillion plus promised investments under BRI that have
since begun to facilitate China’s political and strategic engagement with
all the major stakeholders of the Indo-Pacific narratives. This has also
seen China’s own vision becoming focused on the Indo-Pacific narra-
tives thereby beginning to influence latter’s tone and tenor as well. It
is in this backdrop that this volume seeks to address these dichotomies as

also variations in China’s own evolving engagement with the Indo-Pacific
littoral and its narratives. To streamline a holistic response to this broader
evolving challenge the contributors of this volume held multiple interac-
tions before this final product arrived with our readers; a brief outline of
which follows as part of an introduction to this volume.
In This Volume…
The book, in addition to this introductory chapter, comprises of ten full-
length chapters that have undergone multiple revisions and discussions
to complement each other. This also flows from a broader conceptual
analysis of elucidating threadbare visions and engagement of the two most
powerful actors in the Indo-Pacific namely the United States and China
followed by examining already outlined visions of all major stakeholders
in Indo-Pacific narratives. It is then followed by examining China’s own
vision for what kind of world it aims to work for and how has that vision
been viewed, understood and engaged by other stakeholders of the Indo-
Pacific region.
Dattesh Paulekar in the chapter titled, Decoding ‘Sovereign
Strategic Networks’ in the Indo-Pacific: Contesting China’s
‘Ascendant-Rise’, endeavours to decode the tenor and trajectory of such
emergent networks in shaping congagement frameworks vis a vis China,
through alternative rather than confrontational narratives of normativity
and performance outcomes, competing for mercantilist, connectivity,
and commons governance sweepstakes, through higher-ordering praxis
in sustainable, tangible outcomes. The Indo-Pacific, as articulated by
Dattesh Paulekar, is a geo-strategically spatial concept marked as much
by the shifting centre of gravity, away from the Euro-Atlantic swathe
to the continental expanse and maritime continuum straddling Asia, as
by the incontrovertibility of the buccaneering and robust rise of China
whose performance quotient is anchored, in quintessentially predatory
and unmistakably pioneering dimensions of national power projection.
The author substantiates his argument that the Indo-Pacific is as much
riven by the preponderance of searing Sino-US global competition as by
the substantive rise of a slew of middle powers navigating through novel
processes of multilateralism, systemic multi-polarity, and trajectories of
nifty and nuanced multi-alignment rather than ironclad old hub-n-spokes
centricity. Increasingly, productive partnerships take precedence over
perpetuation and resurrection of ‘zero-sum’ alliances of reductionism.

Preservation of liberalized commerce, sustainable integrity over multi-
vectored connectivity, and pluralized harness of the global commons in
beneficent equity, not predatory hegemony, remains ardent impulses and
idioms for strategic stability. However, these enjoinments also underscore
the stratagems of power-play militating across the Indo-Pacific, seem-
ingly inundated by the overbearing presence of rising China, but, whose
burgeoned footprint is equally a function of the irresistible opportunities,
that portend, for sovereign peers in interchange with it. Communities
reposed of sovereigns, have conventionally been constructed, coalesced
around warding-off common threats, melding affinities of common iden-
tity, or partake of value systems. Notwithstanding, the strategic churn
of complex interdependence that pervades equations and engagement
across the Indo-Pacific, is leading sovereign actors to seek new hues
of strategic networks, rooted in institutionalised-cooperation-sans-the-
institutionalism, a high transactional incidence of play-it-by-ear engage-
ment, pitching for supple minilaterals and efficacious plurilaterals, in flex-
ible aggregation and disaggregation, from overarching cordon-sanitaire
bulwarks.
Rubina Waseem’s chapter titled, US-China Strategic Competi-
tion: Through the matrix of Complex Interdependence, asserts that
the Indo-Pacific region has been a great testing ground for analysing
the politico-economic and geo-strategic dynamics of the great powers’
competition. Since the early 1990s, China and the United States have
had constant sporadic contestations about their control over the Western
Pacific. The end of the Cold War has seen the Indo-Pacific gradually
emerge as the epicentre of their strategic pursuits. Attempting to eluci-
date underpinning theoretical debates of this competition, this chapter
revolves around various evolving push and pull factors undergirding the
dynamics of this region where all global as well as regional powers have
remained trapped in their ever-expanding complex interdependence. The
fact that the Indo-Pacific has also gained spotlight due to its increasing
economic significance has increased the US-China competition and conse-
quently drastically altered its geo-strategic and security dynamics as well.
This chapter contends that in spite of their expanding complex economic
interdependence, it is the clash of geopolitical interests of the two ‘great
powers’ that has driven this perpetual politico-economic insecurity across
this region. While the United States has sought to persistently defend
mechanisms that explain and legitimise its sole ‘superpower’ status, China
being a revisionist state, has striven hard to evolve an alternate ‘balance of

power’ that the United States sees as a challenge to its global dominance.
The United States therefore, has been reviving its time-tested hub-and-
spokes security architecture and cultivating new friends where India has
come to be its new strategic partner for countering a rising China. The
chapter shows how, in the short term, a clash between the United States
and China is less likely, as quintessential China will continue to avoid
directly confronting the US pre-eminence unless its defined ‘redlines’ or
core interests are threatened. The two sides therefore will continue with
their off-again-on-again interactions to manage their trust deficit and to
carve out a sustainable future for themselves.
Stephen R. Nagy’s chapter explores Sino-Japanese relations through
the prism of FOIP. Key lines of enquiry include: (1) How have Sino-
Japanese relations affected the design and implementation of FOIP;
(2) How does FOIP reflect Japan’s long-standing hedging approach to
China; and (3) Does FOIP represent a critical juncture in the Seikei Bunri
formula for bilateral relations? His research suggests that FOIP remains
both an inclusive and exclusive framework to shape the Indo-Pacific
region’s rules-based order in-line with the post-WW 2 international order.
It leaves windows of opportunity to deepen Sino-Japanese relations while
contributing to robust, multilateral institution building to anchor the
United States in the region and constrain China’s efforts to reshape the
region with Chinese characteristics.
Since the end of the Cold War, ASEAN has so assiduously evolved
itself at the very centre or in the driver’s seat in Asia–Pacific affairs. It
has done so by building multiple institutional mechanisms to discuss
economic, political and security issues engaging all major and middle
power stakeholders to what is now called the Indo-Pacific. Don McLain
Gill, in his chapter titled, ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific: Moti-
vations, Opportunities, and Challenges, reminds us that this period
has also witnessed ASEAN’s piecemeal drift from the United States to
China. In fact, China’s unprecedented economic rise has accelerated these
ongoing drifts in not just regional but the global distribution of power.
Beijing’s increased assertion and expansion throughout the Indo-Pacific
region is seen as a direct challenge to the pre-eminence of the United
States that sees itself as the status-quo Pacific power. This has resulted in a
series of strategies to check China’s growing power projection capabilities.
Indeed, the very establishment of the Indo-Pacific concept—that conjoins
the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean—and the revival of the Quadri-
lateral Security Framework between the US, Japan, India and Australia
seeks to preserve and safeguard the current US-led international rules-
based order. It is amid this power competition that ASEAN has become
increasingly wary of being side-tracked from its normative influence and
centrality. This is where, ASEAN, through the initiative of Indonesia, has
crafted this ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific that seeks to maintain
ASEAN role and relevance in the Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Flowing from
its quintessential salience of not disrupting major powers core interests,
the AOIP banks heavily on the need to adhere to existing regional mech-
anisms, the promotion of inclusivity to ensure ASEAN centrality. Though
the AOIP is a step in the right direction for ASEAN, the challenges
concerning the unity and coherence of its member states may outstrip the
potential to maximise from such an initiative. The author asserts that to
utilise the AOIP to its full potential, ASEAN member states must alleviate
the deepening internal fault lines and lagging external connectivity.
Claudia Astarita envisions the European Union as becoming a key
partner of the Indo-Pacific. By emphasising its commitment to act as
a global player in what the EU High Representative Josep Borrell has
defined ‘the region of the future’, the EU has begun to lay the founda-
tions for a completely new strategic orientation. Her chapter titled, China
in EU’s Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, underlines that
this choice is not only the direct consequence of selected European coun-
tries growing economic interdependence within the region, but is also
linked to the need to contribute to the creation of a new multilateral
structure potentially able to contain China and, at the same time, to
scale down the intense geopolitical competition that is exacerbating the
confrontation between China and the United States. Justifying the EU
activism in the Indo-Pacific, however, is not an easy task. First, because
the European Union does not have a stable geographic presence in the
region. Second, because it is not clear whether the EU wants to play a role
in the area as a region or whether it will choose to rely on specific member
states, such as France and Germany, to represent European interest in the
Indo-Pacific. Both options are problematic: the first one might encounter
a huge coordination deficit, the second one might be seen as too personal-
istic. Representation, the author asserts, is not the only challenge the EU
has to face in shaping its Indo-Pacific strategy: by defining its position,
the EU will have to clarify whether it is ready to embrace a multilateral
inclusive framework in which it will maintain an independent position, or
whether it prefers to align with the United States, which would run the
risk of further deteriorating its own relationship with China.
Australia occupies an exceptional geo-strategic position in the Indo-
Pacific region; a large political, economic and defence potential, as well as
the possession of the South Pacific as its immediate sphere of influence.
Artyom A. Garin, in his chapter titled, Evolving Indo-Pacific Multilat-
eralism: China Factor in Australia’s Perspectives, argues that Australia’s
foreign policy vector increasingly depends on the degree of develop-
ment of the Sino-U.S. confrontation. As is well known, the United
States has been Australia’s main strategic and ideological partner, while
China has come to be its main trade destination. While the competi-
tion between the two great powers (China and the U.S.) has increased,
this has made regional environment in the Indo-Pacific multifaceted and
complex creating new challenges or opportunities for Canberra. In order
to reduce its geo-strategic risks, Australia has increasingly turned to multi-
lateral arrangements in the Indo-Pacific region engaging ASEAN, India,
and Japan. This requires the ability to quickly respond to changes in the
balance of power between the United States and China. To understand
its likely trajectories, this chapter first dwells on the evolution of multi-
lateralism in Australia’s defence and foreign policy documents and how it
engages with the rise of the China factor in its commitment to multilateral
cooperation to gauge Australia’s Fifth Continent’s approaches to mitigate
the escalating trend of the anarchic situation in the region. The chapter
deals with the definition of Australia as a middle power and its commit-
ment to multilateral foreign policy. It further elucidates the features and
tendencies of multilateralism in Australia’s defence and foreign policy
vision and builds the connection between multilateralism and the middle
powers’ foreign policy strategies. The author also examines selective and
balanced frames of multilateralism in the context of rapidly transforming
regional alignments in the Indo-Pacific, even as it contends how future
trends on Australia’s foreign policy at the present still remain largely
hostages to the degree of the Sino-U.S. confrontation.
Devendra Kumar Bishnoi, in his chapter titled, The Community of
Shared Futures: China’s Counter to Indo-Pacific Narratives, under-
lines that the idea of the Indo-Pacific Region has involved several
competing and contradictory narratives of regional order-shaping and
being shaped by the overall geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions of
major stakeholders’ competition and cooperation. This chapter attempts
to examine the idea of China’s Community of Shared Future (CSF) as a
counter conception of the regional order presented in Western narratives

on Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP). Prima facie, having evolved from
China’s Asia–Pacific Policy from the late 1980s, the idea of CSF emerged
as a major alternative from China’s imagination of regional order in 2010.
The roots of CSF though are also traced to China’s neighbourhood
policy in the early 2000s followed by China’s ambitious Belt and Road
Initiatives from 2013. These have emerged as major components of this
CSF counter-narrative that are already undercutting Western discourses
on Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Led by the United States and its friends and
allies, FOIP has been advanced as an extension of the liberal international
order. Such a conception of Indo-Pacific is portrayed as aimed at creating
an open and inclusive regional order. But while there are divergences
within FOIP narratives, one of the drivers behind the idea has been their
shared concerns about the rise of China and the need to counter its rising
influence in the region. While China has remained the main trigger for the
FOIP narratives yet existing debates have paid less attention to China’s
own conception of Asia–Pacific regional order. By dwelling on Chinese IR
writings and official discourses to chart the evolution of CSF, this chapter
seeks to provide a critical assessment of the Chinese alternative approach
of community building to evaluate its efficacy as counter-narrative and
what it means for the evolving Asia–Pacific/Indo-Pacific geopolitics.
The Quadrilateral Security Framework (Quad)—comprising of like-
minded democracies of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India—
has firmly endorsed the concept of a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’
(FOIP) that keeps them together. It is their preferred normative strate-
gies committing them to ensuring the stability and sustenance of the
rules-based liberal order in the Indo-Pacific that resonate their shared
values as the core of the Quad framework, avers Mrittika Guha Sarkar in
her chapter titled, China’s Regional Engagement and Quad: Mapping
Conceptual Dynamics. However, the values mentioned above imbibe
greater significance in face of Xi Jinping’s principal slogan of ‘Community
of Shared Future for Mankind’ (CSFM), which also resonates similar
sentiments while projecting Beijing as an earnest builder of global peace,
development and a defender of the international order to ensure a just,
secure, and prosperous world. President Xi’s new outlines mark China’s
strategic shift from Deng Xiaoping’s ‘hide-and-bide’ dictum to a global
activist one, underpinning China’s nationalist geo-economic and geo-
strategic motives, reflected in its Maritime Silk Road (MSR) as also its
supply chain networks, naval assertiveness, and ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy
in the region. Lately, there have been growing concerns regarding China’s
unilateralism through its diplomatic, political, and economic endeavours;
that is, along with the underpinning opaqueness in its commercially ques-
tionable infrastructural projects in the Indo-Pacific. This has made Quad
nations increasingly conscious of China’s activities that are seen as posing
threats to their understanding of basic freedoms, security and stability
of this region through its assertive diplomacy and aggressive military
posturing. In this backdrop, this chapter examines the conceptual under-
currents between China’s regional engagement vis-à-vis the Quad’s tryst
with the Indo-Pacific to analyse their evolution and likely trajectories.
While doing so, the chapter argues that the Quad may not be in position
to easily marginalise China’s expanding footprint in the Indo-Pacific yet
it has the potential to become a balancer to Xi’s CSFM vision that reflects
the critical strategic underpinnings of China’s expanding economic and
strategic access and influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
The diplomatic relations between rising China and Pacific Islands
Countries (PIC’s) goes back to 1970’s and recent decades have witnessed
a gradual increase in China’s trade and investment with these PIC’s. As
a result, China today gives tough competition to region’s major partner
nations. Australia has been especially anxious about China’s increasing
trade and developmental assistance under BRI which has seen PIC’s
constructing schools, hospitals, bridges, roads and stadiums with China’s
investments. In addition to China’s competition to major partner nations
of this region, China’s engagement with PIC has also been guided by its
efforts to undercut PIC’s diplomatic support for Taiwan. Lately, China is
also suspected of using its economic power to accomplish military inter-
ests as well. In this context, the chapter by Madhura Bane seeks to
explore the discourse on China’s engagement in the Pacific islands region.
It also elucidates how the ‘Taiwan factor’ has influenced China’s perspec-
tives on this region. It also illustrates China’s use of economic diplomacy
to achieve security interests where it examines Solomon Islands security
agreement with China as a case study to extrapolate possible future trends.
China’s maneuvering in South Asia has been critiqued in the last
chapter of the volume by Reena Marwah and Abhishek Verma. With
the rise in China’s standing and stature across the globe in general and
the Asia–Pacific region in particular, its influence is increasing rapidly not
only in the economic sphere but also in the cultural, societal and security
spaces. Their chapter provides a synoptic view of China’s presence within
the smaller countries of South Asia. It also underlines the issues between
India and China in the context of their respective spheres of influence

within the subcontinent.
To conclude, the 2021 centenary celebrations of the Communist Party
of China (CPC), founded in 1921, was not lost on the rest of the
world. This was the first of the two centennial goals, along with other
benchmarks, that President Xi has outlined in projecting China’s future
trajectories and how China would like to shape itself as also its periph-
eral regions and the world. Going by the dramatic transition of China
in the last fifty years that witnessed unprecedented unleashing of China’s
productive forces that have brought China to the centre stage of emerging
narratives including those of the Indo-Pacific geopolitics. As this volume
shows in its multi-mentored and extensive analysis, the visibility of China’s
system-shaping capabilities and their gradual engagement by other stake-
holders of the Indo-Pacific have begun to unfold the process of China’s
reluctant and piecemeal, yet decisive engagement with the Indo-Pacific
narratives and engagement of China by these other stakeholders. This
volume in that sense aspires to initiate pioneering efforts in exploring
their overlapping and complimenting elements and how this process of
blending two divergent visions is likely to shape the future of the Indo-
Pacific region and its geopolitics in the coming times. China’s continued
straddling across the globe with its deep pockets and reverberating of
its grandiose pursuits surely calls for experts starting to reminisce, reflect
and revisit various possibilities of China’s ambitious enterprise with impli-
cations for the future of entire humankind but especially what it implies
for the future of China’s immediate periphery.
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
hän kinasteli usein merellä isänsä kanssa, Eveliinaa hän karttoi ja
lopuksi hän lähti merille eikä antanut vuosikausiin tietoja itsestään.
Silloin levisi kumma huhu saaristoon. Pari kaupungin pyssymiestä

oli Skytteskärissä löytänyt miehenruumiin. He olivat etsineet
tuulensuojaa kaatuneen kuusen juurakon takaa ja pystyttäneet
siihen telttansa. Koira oli vainunnut jotain maasta ja alkanut murista
ja kaivaa. Sieltä oli ilmestynyt vanttera miehenruumis, jolla oli jalassa
pitkävartiset saappaat ja musta kiharainen tukka.
Vennström kuuli huhun ensi kertaa kaupungin kalarannassa.

Hänen mielestään ihmiset katsoivat häntä oudon tutkivasti
puhuessaan asiasta. Joka puolella hän kuuli arveltavan ettei se
voinut olla kenenkään muun kuin Löf-vainajan ruumis. Sinä päivänä
hän myi kalat polkuhintaan ja lähti kotimatkalle ennen muita.
Merellä hän hengitti taas helpommin. Oliko kaikki tullut ilmi?

Epäilivätkö ihmiset häntä? Hän oli jo alkanut unohtaa — ei, joka
kerta kun hän näki venehylyn, oli hän muistanut kaikki. Kumma ettei
hän ollut saanut sitä puiksi hakatuksi, vaikka oli monta kertaa
päättänyt. Pimeässä se törrötti siinä aitan sivulla kuin mikäkin
kummitus. Huomenna hän sen hakkaa. Ja tänään, suoraa päätä,
hän laskee Skytteskäriin Ei ei käy, joku voi tuntea veneen! Mutta ensi
yönä.
Illalla hän lähettää rengin ja pojan hakemaan tiilikuormaa

Skoglannista. Ilma on siihen sopiva meri melkein tyyni ja on kuuvalo.
Voi sattua ette pitkään aikaan tule niin sopivaa ilmaa, jonkatähden
on
paras tehdä se tiilimatka nyt.
Kun muut ovat nukkuneet lähtee hän Aspön takarannalta pienellä
ruuhella majakkasaareen. Ovatko he jo kuljettaneet ruumiin pois?
Nyt putosi tähti majakan kohdalla ja se tuntuu hänestä niin
harvinaiselta ja salaperäiseltä että täytyy miettiä sitä pitkän aikaa.
Aivan Skytteskärin rannassa kolahtaa airo hänen kädestään. Häntä
harmittaa, kun älyää että se oli vain koskeloperhe, joka oli nukkunut
vesikivellä ja säikähtyneenä lähtenyt lentoon. Hän kulkee hiipien kuin
pelkäisi jonkun heräävän.
Ruumis on vanhalla paikallaan. Se helpottaa mieltä. Mutta koko

ajan tunkiessaan sitä säkkiin, vilkasee hän vähäväliä majakkaan,
jonka silmä vilkkuu puiden välitse. Se rävähyttää niin ilkeästi siellä
ulkonokassa että hänen tekee mieli käydä sammuttamassa se siksi
aikaa kun on toimittanut asiansa. Onhan hänellä avain.
Vihdoin on hän taakkoineen ruuhessa. Kivi ja köysi ovat valmiina.

Mutta viime hetkessä tulee hän ajatelleeksi että merikin antaa
saaliinsa ja tavallisesti juuri silloin, kun sen pitäisi kätkeä jotakin. Hän
upottaa ruumiin ilman säkkiä, sitoen suuren kivenlohkareen toiseen
nilkkaan. Ja kun Löf-vainaa painuu syvyyteen, ajattelee hän, että jos
köysi katkeekin ja ruumis ajautuu maihin, ei kukaan voi päätellä
muuta kuin että hän on hukkunut.
Sinä yönä nukkui Vennström sikeästi kuin olisi saanut raskaan

päivätyön loppuun. Ja seuraavana päivänä hakkasi hän venehylyn
puiksi.
Pian alettiin puhua että ruumis olikin kadonnut Skytteskäristä.

Hamberg ja Skoglannin Löf olivat käyneet asiaa peräämässä ja
tavanneet ainoastaan kuopan maassa. Joku arveli että pyssymiesten
juttu ruumiista oli ollut perätön, mutta Hamberg ja hänen kanssaan
monet puistivat päätään ja väittivät että nähtävästi se, jota asia
lähinnä koski, oli pitänyt varansa ja ennättänyt ennen muita. Jäljet
olivat kadonneet, mutta yhä yleisemmin alettiin Vennströmiä pitää
murhaajana. Tiedettiin että naapurukset olivat eläneet huonossa
sovussa.
Todistuksia ei ollut. Mutta minne Vennström tulikin, siellä puhuivat

ihmisten silmät mykkää kieltään. Ja hän ymmärsi. Hän ei kulkenut
enää kutomatalkoissa ja harvoin hänet nähtiin häissä tai
hautajaisissa. Hän pysyi ulkona saarellaan, oli mieluiten merellä tai
lintuluodoilla, kun joku poikkesi Aspöhön. Anna-Mari kertoi usein
tavanneensa hänet kävelemässä pitkin rantoja puhelemassa
itsekseen.
Niin kuluivat vuodet. Vennström kutistui kokoon pieneksi

ukonkäppyräksi, jolla oli omituinen tapa vilkaista syrjästä
puhuessaan ihmisten kanssa ja sitten taas katsoa poispäin.
Kalastajapaikkansa ja pelastuslippunsa oli hän luovuttanut toiselle
pojalleen. Hän kutoi verkkoja, kalasteli koukuilla ja eleli leskeksi
jäätyään pienessä mökissä Vähän-Aspön itälahdessa. Vennström oli
käynyt kuuroksi; jos hänelle puhui, vilkasi hän vain syrjästä ja näytti
välinpitämättömältä. Hamberg väitti kuitenkin että hän tekeytyi
kuurommaksi kuin oli. Ja ettei hän erehtynyt selveni Bergin Kallen
hautajaisissa.
Vennström oli nimittäin vastoin tapaansa saapunut niihin

hautajaisiin ja istui kamarissa missä vanhempi polvi joi puolikupposia
Kallen muistoksi. Siinä vainaata kaipaillessa mainittiin Elben
haaksirikko, josta Kallen keuhkotauti oli alkuisin ja Anselm Löfin
hämärä kohtalo. Nuoremmat kyselivät tarkemmin asiaa, vanhemmat
kertoivat puoliääneen, sillä Vennströmhän, joka istui nurkassa, oli
kuuro eikä siis tiennyt että hänestä puhuttiin. Äkkiä kuului parkaus:
»Niin, minä se tapoin Löfin!» Vennström seisoi keskellä lattiaa,
tuijottaen miehiä suoraan kasvoihin. Mutta kun hän aikoi jatkaa,
jäykistyi hän äkkiä ja alkoi vavista ja seuraavana hetkenä hän oli
kadonnut.
Ikkunasta nähtiin hänen hurjaa vauhtia soutavan Aspötä kohti.

Huoneeseen tuli hiljaisuus ja kuin salaisesta sopimuksesta alettiin
puhua muista asioista. Oli kuin ei kukaan olisi kuullut ukon
tunnustusta.
Mutta Vennström ei senjälkeen liikkunut mihinkään Aspöstä. Hän

ei puhutellut muita kuin omaisiaan. Jos vieras kohtasi hänet jäällä
koukkuja syöttämässä, vilkasi hän tätä nopeasti syrjästä ja katseli
sitten suurta ulappaa tahi Skytteskäriä sen laidassa.
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China and The Indo Pacific Maneuvers and Manifestations Swaran Singh Full Chapter

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China and the Indo-Pacific: Maneuvers

and Manifestations Swaran Singh

China and the

ISSN 2662-7922 ISSN 2662-7930 (electronic)

Cover credit: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo

This volume seeks to present both sides of the discourse on Indo-Pacific

It is in this complex backdrop, that this book seeks to examine the

New Delhi, India Swaran Singh

Prof. Swaran Singh

“This ground-breaking compendium by a group of scholars - both estab-

“At a time of accelerating competition in the Indo-Pacific region, this

“A brilliant blending of opposing yet determined interrogations compli-

“A timely volume with an Excellent Set of Contributions perfectly assem-

1 China’s Engagement and the Indo-Pacific 1

7 Evolving Indo-Pacific Multilateralism: China Factor

About the Editors

Prof. Swaran Singh is visiting professor,

Center for Asian Studies (Hong Kong Univer-

Command & Control in Southern Asia:

Prof. Reena Marwah (M.Phil., Delhi Univer-

Security Studies Sri Lanka (INSSSL). She has

Her most recent authored books are Re-

Claudia Astarita is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris and International

(India). His research focuses on the intersections between domestic poli-

‘Economic Headwinds and a Chance of Slower Growth: What the fore-

AAGC Asia-Africa Growth Corridor

CMEC China Myanmar Economic Corridor

SIDS Small Island Developing States

Table 7.1 Australian Defence White Papers (1976–2016) 124

China’s Engagement and the Indo-Pacific

Swaran Singh and Reena Marwah

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

followed appeared a bit cautious clarifying China’s limited endorsement:

The China-Led Transition of Asia–Pacific

The RCEP comprises 15 countries, including the ten ASEAN nations

That would be one way of explaining President Xi’s engaging ‘ASEAN

China’s Engagement by Other Stakeholders

exports to China for 2021 reached $206 billion compared to China’s

is in this backdrop that this volume seeks to address these dichotomies as

perpetuation and resurrection of ‘zero-sum’ alliances of reductionism.

being a revisionist state, has striven hard to evolve an alternate ‘balance of

counter conception of the regional order presented in Western narratives

India and China in the context of their respective spheres of influence

Strategic Partnership for Peace, Security, Prosperity and Sustainable Devel-

Xi, Jinping. (2021), “For a Shared Future of Our Common Home”, 22

Silloin levisi kumma huhu saaristoon. Pari kaupungin pyssymiestä

Vennström kuuli huhun ensi kertaa kaupungin kalarannassa.

Merellä hän hengitti taas helpommin. Oliko kaikki tullut ilmi?

Illalla hän lähettää rengin ja pojan hakemaan tiilikuormaa

Ruumis on vanhalla paikallaan. Se helpottaa mieltä. Mutta koko

Vihdoin on hän taakkoineen ruuhessa. Kivi ja köysi ovat valmiina.

Sinä yönä nukkui Vennström sikeästi kuin olisi saanut raskaan

Pian alettiin puhua että ruumis olikin kadonnut Skytteskäristä.

Todistuksia ei ollut. Mutta minne Vennström tulikin, siellä puhuivat

Niin kuluivat vuodet. Vennström kutistui kokoon pieneksi

Vennström oli nimittäin vastoin tapaansa saapunut niihin

Ikkunasta nähtiin hänen hurjaa vauhtia soutavan Aspötä kohti.

Mutta Vennström ei senjälkeen liikkunut mihinkään Aspöstä. Hän

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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