ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the Indian Ocean region has increasingly become a zone of competition between two aspiring great powers, China and India. Beijing has strong and growing strategic interests, and those are increasingly taking it beyond the near waters of the South and East China Seas and well into the Indian Ocean. In particular, the eastern Indian Ocean is of growing and increasingly diversified significance to Beijing. Much of this strategic competition stems from China’s increasing penetration of the Indian Ocean region, particularly “China’s developing strategic presence and infrastructure projects in places such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), and Djibouti.” While today China might not possess a coherent constellation of “bases and places” stretching across the Indian Ocean, it is increasing its global reach more than ever before. Other elements of China’s putative “string of pearls” in the Indian Ocean are less perhaps impressive but still potentially game-changing.
