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Between 2016 and 2018, Australia’s perceptions of China underwent a significant reality check, with global implications. Australia has been a first mover in pushing back against Chinese foreign int...

An active Chinese strategic presence in the Indian Ocean is no longer merely the stuff of speculation. India and other resident powers need to not only adjust to this reality but also exploit their geographic and diplomatic advantages to encourage China to operate in these waters cooperatively, not unilaterally. India could do this through a combination of further bolstering its own maritime capabilities, sustaining its capacity building for smaller island states, and deepening defense cooperation with such partners as the United States, Australia, Japan, France, and Indonesia. These steps could be augmented by the reinforcement of regional diplomatic institutions and visible efforts to engage China in security cooperation and dialogue, such as on transnational issues like search and rescue or noncombatant evacuations.This analysis begins with an assessment of China's expanding interests and presence in the Indian Ocean, followed by a summary of India's perspectives and responses. It concludes with some broad recommendations regarding the right mix of capabilities, posture, and partnerships for India to manage the impact of an inevitable Chinese role in its maritime neighborhood.China's Growing Presence in the Indian OceanSince early 2009, China has maintained a naval force to counter piracy in and near the Gulf of Aden. Chinese forces have also been deployed for noncombatant evacuations, notably in Yemen. Warships and submarines are becoming increasingly frequent visitors to Indian Ocean waters, making use of dual-use port infrastructure in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and elsewhere. In addition, China is openly establishing a permanent military facility in Djibouti, and talk of a future network of access points or even overseas bases-a taboo idea just a decade ago-is becoming uncontroversial and commonplace in Chinese strategic circles. Unilateral combat exercises and, as recently as May 2016, counterpiracy exercises have occurred in the eastern Indian Ocean near Australia's island territories,1 while Chinese naval transits of Indonesia's Sunda Strait are becoming unexceptional.Given all these maritime activities, Xi Jinping's signature international initiative of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, while initially a geoeconomic project, will almost certainly have a security dimension that justifies an Indo-Pacific security footprint for China. The flag will follow infrastructure as well as trade.Much of this should not be a surprise. China has legitimate interests in the Indian Ocean. It is a great power and a trading economy enormously dependent on Indian Ocean sea lanes for its energy imports and container cargo. The predictability and security of this seaborne traffic are correspondingly critical to domestic economic, social, and thus political stability-indeed, to the survival of the Communist Party as the legitimate holder of state power. Accordingly, it would have been astounding if China had indefinitely outsourced the security of these critical sea lines of communication to the navies of strategic competitor the United States and U.S. allies and partners.Credible Chinese analysts such as You Ji (in this roundtable) are notably beginning to identify the contours of a Chinese Indo-Pacific maritime strategy, even if specific Indo-Pacific terminology is still treated with some wariness in China. The Maritime Silk Road, it could be argued, is proving to be the Indo-Pacific with Chinese characteristics.For other states, China's now-permanent presence in the Indian Ocean is cause neither for rejoicing nor despair. It is a fact. The question then becomes how other powers manage this historic shift in ways that protect and advance their own interests, as well as wider regional stability. A reasonable response would seem to be one that respects China's legitimate interests as an Indian Ocean power without harming the interests of others.A related consideration is the logic of engaging China as a provider of security "public goods" in the Indian Ocean. …

A superficial reading of the South China Sea issue, informed by Beijing's propaganda line that the disputes amount simply to bilateral differences over principally Chinese maritime territory, would suggest that it is none of Australia's business. In reality, Australia has substantial stakes in what happens in these waters, where assertiveness and the manufacture of militarized islands have raised concerns about coercion and conflict. As a major trading nation, the world's thirteenth-largest economy, a regional maritime player in the Indo-Pacific, a middle power that benefits from the protection of norms and international law, a partner to its Asian neighbors, and an ally of the United States, Australia has myriad reasons to engage on this important strategic challenge. Historically, it has enacted and gained from freedom of navigation and commerce through this sea and air route. It also has a good record of multilateral diplomacy to reduce regional dangers. Reports of the Royal Australian Air Force quietly exercising freedom of navigation in late 2015 suggest that Canberra will continue to assert its rights and encourage a rules-based international response to tensions.1 There remains some uncertainty, however, about how far Australia is prepared to go, including in the context of its weighty economic relationship with China.This essay provides an overview of Australian views on the South China Sea and discusses a range of options available for Australia to protect its interests in this important region.Looking Back: The Evolution of Australian Views on the South China SeaAustralia is no stranger to the South China Sea. Its air force has exercised rights of overflight and surveillance in these waters since the 1970s, including in support of allied operations to track Soviet ships and submarines during the Cold War.2 Its decades of trading relations with North Asia have involved heavy reliance on these sea lanes. As an early contributor to regional security diplomacy, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum and other ASEAN-centric institutions, Canberra has sustained serious efforts to build the regimes of confidence building, transparency, and conflict prevention that Asia has long needed to maintain stability and guard the gains of prosperity.Even so, until the upsurge of tensions and assertiveness over the past five years, the South China Sea did not feature prominently in official public documents about Australian foreign and defense policy. A brief survey of the past two decades is illuminating. In the 1980s, despite simmering territorial differences and occasional conflict between China and Vietnam, Australia saw the South China Sea essentially in a Cold War context: the 1987 defense white paper referred to it only as a zone for Australian surveillance flights from a forward base in Butterworth, Malaysia.3 By the 1994 white paper, with the end of the Cold War, Canberra began to acknowledge concern about "competing territorial claims" among "well-armed nations."4 The situation was still seen as one among many regional problems to be "handled carefully" rather than as a major threat. This of course was still an era when China's growing military power and economic heft were of concern mainly because the country was growing so rapidly, not because of demonstrations of coercive behavior or a perceived ambition to seek to eclipse the U.S.-led alliance system.Australia's deepening security anxieties around China's military power and U.S.-China strategic competition were made plain in the 2009 defense white paper.5 Yet although worries about China's maritime ambitions clearly informed this blueprint for a strong Australian navy, the focus was not specifically the South China Sea, which was left unmentioned. This was in marked contrast with a series of policy statements in subsequent years. As territorial tensions rose, and China's stance from 2009 onward took on characteristics of assertiveness, risk-taking, and sometimes coercion, Australia's policy position of general concern became sharper and more explicit. …

Rory Medcalf is Australia’s most prominent commentator on the Indo-Pacific region, and has played an important role in popularizing the concept throughout the region. In this chapter, he explores the forces that are leading to a greater Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean and India’s options in responding to that presence. Medcalf argues that for India, and for other resident powers of the Indian Ocean, the accelerated arrival of China as a security player should be cause neither for panic nor complacency. There is still scope to ensure that China in the Indian Ocean becomes neither destabilizingly defensive nor dangerously dominant. In particular, India needs to take the initiative in building maritime security cooperation with a range of capable Indian Ocean-going powers that are well-disposed to its rise in order to create a stable strategic environment in which China will play an important role.

The label Indo-Pacific is replacing Asia-Pacific as a framework for regional order. In the contest to define Asia conceptually, the broader label has strategic consequences in managing China’s rise while also incorporating the United States into an inclusive region. Various leaders have introduced new terminology such as “Act East” and “confluence of two seas.” They point to a maritime super-region with its geographical center in Southeast Asia. It serves as the intersection of the interests of at least four major powers as well as of significant middle powers. The scale of the Indo-Pacific dilutes the ability of any one country unilaterally to shape the regional order. The economic and strategic interconnectedness of this two-ocean region translates into both mutual benefit and mutual vulnerability.

The 2013 Australian Defence White Paper categorically termed Australia's zone of strategic interest the Indo-Pacific, the first time any government has defined its region this way. This raises questions about what the Indo-Pacific means, whether it is a coherent strategic system, the provenance of the concept and its implications for Asian security as well as Australian policy. Indo-Pacific Asia can best be understood as an expansive definition of a maritime super-region centred on South-East Asia, arising principally from the emergence of China and India as outward-looking trading states and strategic actors. It is a strategic system insofar as it involves the intersecting interests of key powers such as China, India and the USA, although the Indo-Pacific subregions will retain their own dynamics too. It suits Australia's two-ocean geography and expanding links with Asia, including India. The concept is, however, not limited to an Australian perspective and increasingly reflects US, Indian, Japanese and ...

With fast-growing economies, defence capabilities and international interests, China and India are becoming increasingly active as contributors of public goods in international security, such as anti-piracy operations, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, capacity-building, stabilisation and peacekeeping. This article examines the drivers and characteristics of China's and India's growing roles in contributing to security public goods. It also considers the extent to which modernisation of these rising Asian powers' conventional military capabilities is suited for these roles; the conditions under which China and India might expand such activities; and some of the possible consequences of enhanced Chinese and Indian roles in protecting the commons using military means. Those effects include potential impacts on the management of transnational security problems, the extension of Chinese or Indian geopolitical influence, the worsening of Sino-Indian strategic competition, and the ways other powers migh...

The Australian Defence White Paper released by the Labor Government of Julia Gillard in May 2013 included a notable departure from previous such policy documents: a categorical shift towards identifying Australia's region of strategic interest as something called the Indo-Pacific. In 2014, Australia was chair of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) and IORA, using both as platforms for building maritime security cooperation in the Indian Ocean and beyond. By the time China began engaging with Asian multilateralism in the 1990s, the game was distinctly Asia-Pacific: not only APEC, but the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and its wider security dialogue, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). To be sure, there is some clear interplay and mutual encouragement, experimentation or emboldening at work here: some notable appearances of the term have been for instance in joint statements or press conferences such as in India's interactions with ASEAN, Australia or Japan, or Australia's interactions with the United States.