Thread by @ConstantinoX

Thread 4/7:
China

Must India’s foreign affairs strategy change?
S. Menon, India (Brookings)
Alyssa Ayres, USA (CFR)
Justin Vaisse, France (PPF)
Dino P. Djalal, Indonesia (FPCI)
Rory Medcalf, Australia (ANU)

Transcript + video: brookings.edu/events/webinar…

S. Menon:
“[today's trust levels] much lower [than in 2007]. If you look at what's happened ... [at] the various flash points, South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, [will] naturally lead you to slightly different conclusions. Chinese themselves stopped talking of peaceful rise.” 2

S Menon:
"all of us here certainly, have an important relationship with China, which includes both competition and cooperation. And where we use various forms to try and promote, encourage the kind of Chinese behaviour that we would like to see – not always successfully." 3

S Menon: "If you look at the kind of cooperation that we are carrying out among ourselves, a lot of it is because of this new assessment of where China is and what she is trying to do. So, I often say to my Indian friends, that we owe many of our friends to the Chinese." 4

D Djalal: "Usually, we talk of strategic autonomy in terms of maintaining equidistance between Indonesia and the great powers ...But now, we define strategic autonomy in terms of being as close as possible to Beijing and Washington." 5

J Vaisse:
"[Re France engagement of India, price with China?] I think it's not a zero-sum game in a sense. It’s really about reasserting what we believe in along with our partners, and the price to pay for that is not very high." 6

J Vaisse:
"2020 a turning point for the perception of China in the EU. …something has been broken ...It's an actor in the world stage with which we can engage on a number of things ... but it's a competitor in terms of the model it puts forward and the geopolitical influence” 7

R Medcalf:
"[increasing view] in the Australian policy community that the more trouble we have with China, the more importantly India is in our constellation. I think that we're beginning to learn though, of course, the much more rounded sophistication of engaging with India." 8

A Ayres: “we are now entering a moment where, all of a sudden, everybody's focused on China ...makes it very hard to try to find space in the foreign policy discussions ...to really talk about the importance of a partnership between two democracies that lacks a kind of urgency" 9

S Menon:
"the ideal position for India, of course, is to be closer to both China and the US than they are to each other. And that shouldn't be difficult given the way their relations are going." 10 / end