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Confronted during the first decade of the twenty-first century with the rapidly burgeoning US-Indian security partnership and then by the emergence of the India-Japan security relationship, Beijing struggled to respond. After initially attempting to court India away from a too-close partnership with the United States in the first half of the decade, Beijing shifted to a more coercive approach around the end of 2005. One key mechanism used to pressure India was psychological war waged via the Internet raising the possibility of another Sino-Indian war. As China shifted from a soft to a hard-line approach toward India, policy toward Japan was moving in the opposite direction. After keeping relations with Japan in the freezer during the early part of the decade, around 2006, Beijing shifted gear and adopted a much more conciliatory approach. The authors hypothesize that these simultaneous shifts in Sino-Indian and Sino-Japanese relations were not coincidence but predicated instead on an understandin...

This article considers various security predicaments affecting relations between India and China. These Sino-Indian security predicaments include their territorial dispute, their nuclear arms race, their encirclement and alignment scenarios, their trade and energy issues, and their future prospects. International relations (IR) theory is deployed around these varied security predicaments, with power and perception particularly evident in IR realism, geopolitics, constructivism, and security dilemma dynamics. Balance-of-power theory is complemented by balance-of-threat considerations. India's hedging strategy towards China and China's own strategy of transition point to each country looking to their own respective rise for the mid century.