ABSTRACT
The Sino-Indian strategic partnership of April 2005 capped a long process, spanning almost two decades, of slow improvement in the relationship between Asia’s two giants. This gradual thawing of ties was interrupted for a few years after 1998 when India conducted a series of nuclear tests and announced that it had joined the ranks of nuclear weapons states. With this declaration, Sino-Indian ties reached their nadir, especially when India’s minister of defense George Fernandes asserted that India’s decision was, in large part, a response to the Chinese threat. The trajectory that led these bitter rivals to set aside the mutual suspicions and acrimony that had marred their relationship for decades in the past and, in a dramatic turnaround, to sign a historic partnership, is a testament not so much to the burial of their rivalry as to the pragmatic realization in both New Delhi and Beijing that engagement rather than estrangement would widen their strategic choices in the fluid twenty-first century regional and global environment. The Sino-Indian partnership represents a tactical détente between two
countries which have both convergent and divergent interests and whose leaders have come to the conclusion that their respective aspirations for status, power, and influence on the Asian continent can, for the near-to-medium term, only be pursued through limited mutual accommodation rather than confrontation. If the two countries are able to sustain this partnership over the long term, it might, by ameliorating tensions between two countries with the capability and potential of destabilizing the entire Asian region, have a positive impact on the evolving security order(s) in Asia. However, a degradation of the relationship in the long term stemming either from a revival of mutual hostilities, acute political instability in either country, or a marked downward turn in the regional or global environment, would have negative implications for security in Asia. To sustain these propositions, this chapter seeks (1) to examine the key
elements of the Sino-Indian agreement in order to gauge the depth of the partnership; (2) to identify areas of cooperation and friction between China and India in order to assess the reasons behind the hedging strategies that have been deployed by the two countries vis-à-vis each other both within and out-
and the opportunities that may help predict the long-term viability of the partnership.
