The Talk
Are China and India friends or foes? Views within China on India are far from uniform on this question. Sometimes they may appear to converge on specific topics, such as the border or the Indian Ocean, but among the general Chinese populace, India remains an abstraction. Knowledge of and concerns over India are often distant from the realities in which these two countries’ interests increasingly intersect and mirror one another. Work on India has long been the purview of a select few within the analytical communities within China. China and India remain locked in a stagnant embrace when it comes to the most intractable of security dilemmas: the Sino-Indian border issue. Yet, a closer look at Chinese and Indian military, scientific and academic experts’ security perceptions vis-à-vis one another reveals that there is much more to the Sino-Indian security dynamic than meets the eye. Chinese and Indian strategic analysts hold divergent interests when evaluating each other’s military modernization, the former preoccupied with India’s naval development and the latter with China’s army. Technical analysts in each country share a similar level of interest in the other’s aviation and aerospace programs. Experts with a more scholarly bent exhibit a strong, if not symmetrical, level of focus on the other country’s nuclear strategy and status. This talk provided both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of each of these groups’ perceptions.
PS : This talk has no video.