Asia's Arc of Advantage - icrier

co-operation. Although the pace of India’s integration has been slow, it has slowly but certainly
begun to change the geopolitical conceptions of Asia and erase the differences between East
Asia and South Asia. Intensifying this process was the rapid economic growth of China. The
development of China’s eastern seaboard in the early years of reform saw the integration of the
Chinese economy with that of East Asia. When China launched its West Region Development
Strategy in 2000, it focused on connecting its underdeveloped regions in the far west and south
west with Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia. The more recent opening of Myanmar,
the last major economy in Southeast Asia to globalise, will make sure that the geographic
distinctions between different parts of Asia will increasingly break down.
The growing economic integration of Asia with itself is not limited to land territories. It has
also brought forth a strategic perspective that sees the Pacific and Indian Oceans as a single
continuum. East Asia’s early industrialisers, Japan and Korea, have long been dependent on the
energy resources of the Gulf. China’s economic modernisation has made that interdependence
much stronger. China has not only become one of the biggest importers of oil from the Gulf,
it has also increasingly focused on Africa for energy and mineral resources. Unlike many East
Asian countries that have been content to rely on the United States for the maintenance of
order in Asia’s high seas, China is clearly focused on building independent blue water naval
capabilities to secure its expanding interests in the Indian Ocean. It is also actively constructing
strategic maritime infrastructure in the Indian Ocean that will facilitate the pursuit of its growing
maritime interests in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, India’s trade and economic relations with
East Asia are acquiring greater weight, with more than fifty per cent of its trade flows now
heading east. India’s stake in the political stability and security of the Western Pacific has also
steadily risen. New Delhi’s ‘Look East’ policy has acquired a distinct naval dimension over the
last decade. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the Indian Navy has made continuous forays into
the Western Pacific. The traditional clear distinctions, then, between the Indian Ocean and the
Pacific are beginning to erode. The economic transformation of China and India has begun to
bend the spaces around them and produce new geographic constructions. The economic growth
in East Asia in the 1980s generated the concept of the ‘Pacific Rim’. The expansion of this growth
to Southeast Asia led to the construction of the term Asia-Pacific. China’s increasing reliance
on the Indian Ocean and the acceleration of India’s economic growth and strategic interests
in the Pacific has now led the increasing use of the term, ‘Indo-Pacific’. The intersection of the
maritime interests of a rising China and an emerging India with those of the United States that
has long provided security in the two oceans has begun to give the ‘Indo-Pacific’ a distinctive
geopolitical character. 8
The idea of Indo-Pacific, which has gained some traction in recent years, is not entirely new. The
German geopolitical thinker Karl Haushofer had expanded upon the idea of “Indopazifischen
Raum” or the ‘Indo-Pacific space’ in the 1920s. Before him, Mahan saw Asia and its waters as a
single space. The Second World War, as we noted earlier, saw the two theatres as a single military
zone. And the British imperial defence system stretched from the eastern Mediterranean to
the South China Sea and was centred on India. What is new and more current has been the
tendency to see Asia as consisting of separate zones and dividing its littoral into the Indian and
8 For a discussion of the emergence of the concept see, David Scott, “The Indo-Pacific: New Regional
Formulations and New Maritime Frameworks for U.S.-India Strategic Convergence”, Asia-Pacific Review,
Vol. 19, No. 2, November 2012, pp. 85-109.
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