China's View of Southwest India: Partners or Competitors?

Far from being the "quaint" perhaps even backward nations of a generation or two earlier, China and India are both now advancing both in terms of productivity, technology and a effective multi-million person workforce. China is the focus of much international investment, although as the recent Time-Warner pullout shows, not without some nationalist (no pun intended) setbacks. India has been advancing its educational systems, now turning out engineers, IT experts and other 21st century technological savants in some ways outpacing the Americans. With both nations primed to exert their influence on their region- primarily Southeast Asia (as a beginning) should we see these two as competitors or partners in an efforts to strengthen commerce in Asia as opposed to the Western nations, including, of course, the U.S.? We cannot remain as spectators.

The balance of power in Asia is not merely shifting to China's economic emergence, but the efforts of China and India to come to some sort of agreement and rapprochement, especially with the threat of Pakistan and its nuclear capabilities (and its Muslim extremists) lurking.

The People's Republic is both a marvel, economically and politically, as well as a potential threat, economically and militarily. "A nation with a fifth of the world's population has had a bad 500 years....And then, in the space of a few decades, it steps forward. Its economy grows at a rate for which the word `miraculous' seems too modest. Its culture shows a new vitality. Its armed forces modernize. And the rest of the world watches, impressed and nervous at the same time, wondering if the new giant still seethes with resentment....A friendly China?...[or] a China that saw itself as a natural enemy of the United States? So: which will it be?" (Auchincloss et al 24)