The ‘Indo-Pacific’ and geopolitical anxieties about China's rise in the Asian regional order

Abstract

The Indo-Pacific seems to have come of age. In a growing body of literature on this subject, the rise of India and China, as well as the ensuing great-power competition and deepening economic links across the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean regions are often seen as mere (albeit new) geopolitical realities, which the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ can best capture. This article, however, questions the ‘naturalness’ of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ and illustrates how it is largely a product of geopolitical imaginations about the perceived ‘rise of China’—imaginations that are shared among some influential observers and practitioners, particularly in the USA, Australia, Japan and India. Fuelled by their collective anxieties about China's growing influence in Asia, the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is not an innocent or neutral description, but is a manufactured super-region designed to hedge against a perceived Sino-centric regional order. In doing so, it is complicit in the production of great-power rivalries and regional security dilemmas. It is thus important that the ‘Indo-Pacific’ construct be subject to critical re-examination and re-imagination.