AFPC Receives Grant to Study Sino-Indian Relations

AFPC Kraemer Strategy Fellow Jeff M. Smith has received funding to produce a major study on Sino-Indian relations to be conducted over the next year. Smith has been analyzing the political, military, and strategic relationship of Asia’s two biggest powers in recent years and has written on the subject for the Wall Street Journal Asia, Jane’s Intelligence Review, and the Harvard International Review, among other publications.
The project is designed to fill critical gaps in knowledge within Washington about this increasingly important relationship. Surging growth rates in both countries over the past two decades have underpinned dramatic expansions of each country’s military capabilities and geopolitical ambitions, at times causing friction in the relationship. Smith will focus on tensions over their disputed border (over which they fought a war in 1962), as well as hostility over China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean, and India’s efforts to forge stronger relationships with China’s East Asian neighbors.
America has a compelling interest in the evolution and trajectory of this relationship, given the strategic partnership it has nurtured with India over the past decade and the depth of its economic interdependence with China.
Smith will interview U.S. government officials and top Asia experts based in Washington, D.C. and in the coming year will travel to both India and China to conduct field research and meet top foreign affairs experts in both countries, culminating in a monograph and a series of conferences and events to promote the findings.