Abstract
This chapter faces China from the vantage point of the South/Southeast Asian region. It analyzes Sino-Indian contestation for influence in their overlapping regional “orbits” of political, military, and economic influence. Looking at the Bay of Bengal, clashes over territory, and the role of Sri Lanka and Burma as sites of competition for power, I argue that the two countries are learning to cooperate and compete in ways that are respectful of one another’s vital role in Asia and the world more generally. The Sino-Indian ‘waltz’ demonstrates postcolonial learning rather than hegemonic competition as understood in realist or liberal theoretical approaches. China and India are hardly friends, however, their bilateral and regional relations suggest that they have learned too much to not be respectful of one another’s strategic interests. This chapter explores some important contours of the bilateral and regional relationship between the Dragon and the Elephant to better understand the evolving regional geopolitical and economic landscape of the 21st century.
I am grateful to Jeremy Paltiel, Paul Evans and Myles Hulme for their insightful comments at various stages of completing this manuscript.
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Notes
- 1.
The politics of naming in postcolonial societies is important. Following the pro-democracy, anti-junta uprisings of 1988, some pro-democracy activists have refused the junta’s 1989 legal renaming of the country to Myanmar claiming that their government does not have the requisite legitimacy to do so. Locally, the territory has long been referred to in writing as Myanmar, while being referred to colloquially as Burma. In essence, the debate over the name Burma or Myanmar speaks to the modern international norm of state sovereignty and the right of formerly colonized states to redefine their national identities on the one hand, while simultaneously bringing into focus the potentially anti-democractic nature of global norms that value the stability of the state sovereignty over human sovereignty. Humans have lived in the territories known today as Burma or Myanmar for at least 10,000 years, with small city–state like entities present, engaging in international trade, and record keeping for some 2,500 years. The Pagan empire eventually brought much of what we describe as modern day Burma/Myanmar into a political union that would fragment and reform based on local geopolitics until the lengthy Anglo-Burmese wars (1824–1885). In the nineteenth century, British colonizers called the territory “Burmah”. In Asia, where the norm of territorial sovereignty is extremely important to postcolonial national elites, the junta’s renaming of the country as Myanmar has been simply accepted. In this chapter, I refer to the territory as Myanmar when discussing BIMSTEC and Asian relations, but outside of this context, I refer to it as Burma.
- 2.
Especially, for example, in the third Indochina war, commonly referred to as the “Vietnam” war. Hanoi relied heavily on its diplomatic relations with the governments of Indira and then Rajiv Gandhi, supported tacitly by the Soviet Union as a strategy to build an Anti-China presence in Asia. See Garver 1987.
- 3.
Where East Pakistan became the new state of Bangladesh.
- 4.
“Ceylon” was the European colonial name for the island known as the “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka” since 1972. It was called “Lanka” in ancient Sanskrit texts and “Serendib”, the Arabic root word for “serendipity” by Arab traders.
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Parasram, A. (2016). Orbits of Influence: The Sino-Indian Waltz in South/Southeast Asian New Regionalism. In: Cao, H., Paltiel, J. (eds) Facing China as a New Global Superpower. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-823-6_11
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