China Upset with Increasing Indo-US Relations: Experts

The growing Indo-US friendship has upset China, said a prominent US scholar, arguing that Beijing’s four-decade-old policy of dealing with India on their own terms has gone haywire.

Speaking in a panel discussion on “China 2025” held on Monday by the esteemed Council on Foreign Relations, Evan Feigenbaum, its Senior Fellow for East, Central and South Asia, said that China is increasingly becoming unnerved about the expanding Indo-US ties.

“Since 1962, the Chinese strategists have basically decided that they can deal with India on their own terms. But when you introduce the United States into that equation, it introduces all kinds of uncertainties into Chinese planning,” he said.

At the same time, he noted India, as for China, has been a second, if not a third tier security priority so far.

Another renowned scholar, expressing the same opinion, said that China is the dominant power in a unipolar Asia and it is India, which, to some degree, balances the power of Beijing.

“Asia without active participation of the US is not multipolar, it is unipolar with China as the dominant power, possibly balanced to some extent by India,” Princeton University’s Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Aaron Friedberg said in the discussion.