ABSTRACT
What this book is about India-China relations continue to capture attention in international relations politics. While US-China relations attract discussion, given the political and economic supremacy of the two protagonists, and China-Japan relations are signified by a certain stereotypical power politics of cooperation-conflict that many bilateral relationships in the world represent, India-China relations are distinctive, given the two countries’ primacy as ‘emerging and enduring powers’. They represent two modes of civilisation, demographically strong societies, and promising economic and geography forte, bringing cooperation and collaboration, coexistence and convergence, and competition and conflict on a single platform, signifying the most complex and dynamic relationship in world politics. Three mainstream prisms – realism, idealism and constructivism – primarily explain the character of most contemporary bilateral relations. Most scholars and experts have also seen the India-China dynamism through these three prisms. Indian and Chinese scholars and experts have often portrayed this dynamics in the light of their indigenous perspective; non-Indian/non-Chinese scholars have claimed to be more objective. But they ignore that India-China relations are much more complicated than coming under the canvas of the defined theoretical prism of realism/idealism/constructivism. This book shuns these mainstream theoretical prisms, and seeks to illuminate the underlying complications characterising this bilateral relationship that go far beyond the realism/idealism/constructivism construct through a methodological, orderly and structural analysis. The realist prism of India-China relations explains the power rivalry, antagonism and competition between the two Asian neighbours.1 It posits that if both countries continue to grow on their current power trajectory, a strong power rivalry between them will be inevitable, given that both stand a sound chance of becoming superpowers in times to come.2 In contrast, the liberalist prism plumps for a cooperative relationship, stable engagement and cooperation. It posits that the strategic rivalry is muted, with a diversity of institutional, bilateral as well as multilateral engagement and economic interdependence3 in the interest of evolving a ‘non-Western’ world order that is very much multipolar, thinking alike as Asian powers and as ‘emerging powers’ (Panda 2013). This discourse of realism
and idealism has further emerged as neo-realism and neo-liberalism, to depend upon constructivism to evaluate and contextualise India-China relations in a more objective and neutral perspective. Constructivism does offer a nuanced and constructive explanation of IndiaChina ties, following a mid-course, and accepts that cooperation and conflict in these ties are concurrent.4 But constructivism is often dominated by a liberal mode of thinking, closer to idealism (Bozdaliolu 2007), a result of which has been the coinage of an idea like ‘Chindia’.5 Constructivism overlooks that in a complex relationship such as that between India and China, traditional realities like history, culture and social constructs often play a strong role in state politics along with contemporary realities of present-century world politics. These contemporary realities are mainly national interests: geographic resources or energy resources, identity or image as a nation, or authority principle, which is a type of influence that often comes with or without state power. This book essentially seeks to cover these unforeseen and inexplicable characters in India-China relations in an already arrived multipolar world order. Existing studies mostly focus on the usual bilateral impediments in IndiaChina relations such as their boundary dispute and complexities linked to Tibet and Tibetan affairs, while covering select regional complexities in the neighbourhood region. But the rise of India and China as two major economies and political actors in regional and global politics necessitates scholarly debate and systematic methodological analysis not only regarding their bilateral ties; but also the significance of their sub-regional, regional, cross-continental and global pursuits. The India-China dynamics at the sub-regional and crosscontinental levels is a relatively new area of power dynamics that needs systematic analysis, because they have considerably influenced India-China ties. These polygonal, multifaceted and multilateral parlances call for a strong methodological inquiry.
