Between 'China Threat Theory' and 'Chindia': Chinese Responses to India's Military Modernization

Abstract

Since India’s nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998 and China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, the two countries have faced the flow and ebb of western sanctions. Under these controls, China and India’s initial development occurred largely within a military supply vacuum that resulted in an early dependence on Russian, and later Israeli cooperation, increasingly supplemented and in some cases replaced by domestic production. In 2000, however, this pattern began to undertake a marked shift. It was during this year that then US President Bill Clinton made the first visit by a sitting US president to the subcontinent since that of Jimmy Carter in 1978. This momentous occasion set analysts talking about the potential lifting of United States sanctions against India. Within a year, and with the lifting of sanctions, the US–India strategic partnership became a reality. In 2001, the United States conducted a large-scale removal of Indian companies from the US Entity List and in 2005 came the announcement of US–India intent to engage in civil nuclear cooperation. This article explores the impact of these two once similar and increasingly divergent military modernization and procurement trajectories. Given that India has become the primary beneficiary of this shift, this article will quantitatively and qualitatively measure changing Chinese perceptions of India’s forces in the wake of sanctions lifting on the part of the West and the military procurement imbalance it left behind.