Forum: Power Plays

THE FIRST HALF OF 2017 was, for the most part, relatively quiet on China’s disputed periphery. But the simultaneous mid-year standoffs that broke out on land and sea showed up some of the foreign policy implications of the transition to a New Era heralded by General Secretary Xi Jinping at the Nineteenth Party Congress: from ‘standing up’ to ‘prospering’ to ‘strengthening’ 从站起来、富起来到强起来.

X I JINPING DESCRIBED the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as ‘the project of the century’ at the inaugural Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing in May, promising that it would ‘herald a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation’.12 But along with cooperation, there is competition — and when it comes to the Belt and Road’s Indo-Pacific maritime route and its designs on Africa, Japanese and Indian leaders have expressed strong reservations about Chinese security and economic architectures.