Sino-indian Cooperative Security Research In The Indian Ocean Region

With the emergence of China and India, Sino-Indian relations have attracted increasingly worldwide attention. Currently, the Sino-Indian relations shows a tendency of steady growth, but meantime being challenged with both traditional and emerging realistic factors. And the security "dilemma" over Indian Ocean becomes a new vital challenge for Sino-India relations.China’s presence in Indian Ocean is inevitable, due to its need for the natural resources, economic and trade benefits over this area. And based on the principle of peaceful development, China has been cautious over Indian Ocean issues. However, India still holds a hostile attitude towards China’s presence in the Indian Ocean, which resulted in the obstacles in Sino-Indian relations. Fortunately, this predicament is not caused by structural conflicts, because given China’s maritime strategy and national security outlook, China’s maritime interest at present stage largely lies in the East China Sea and South China Sea, which are the central interest areas of national interest closely related to national sovereignty, and the Indian Ocean isn’t covered in China’s central interest areas. Therefore, the predicament over the Indian Ocean faced by China and India could be resolved effectively, and the "Cooperative Security" thinking can be regarded as a good way."Cooperative Security" was a new security model that first appeared in the 1990s. It refers to achieving a relatively secure state through bilateral, trilateral and multilateral cooperation covering extensive participants, such as countries, international organizations and so on. Under "Cooperative Security" thinking, two successful paradigms appeared, EU and ASEAN, which drew extensive attention. Being an ardent advocate of this security model, China tries to handle international affairs, conduct international and regional cooperation and play an active role in developing friendships with neighboring countries by making use of it. "Cooperative Security", though being incomplete and immature on theoretic basis, will be attached more importance and well accepted with the reinforcement of economic globalization and regional integration.The paper aims at analyzing the predicament of Sino-India relations over Indian Ocean, and providing a solution for this non-structural disputes through the approach of "Cooperative Security". Currently, favorable and disadvantageous factors coexist in Sino-Indian cooperation. The complementary relations of the economic structure between China and India, the long-history cultural and people-to-people exchanges as well as the common aspiration to have win-win development all provide favorable conditions for Sino-India cooperation. However, Great powers like United States and Japan also make their way into the Indian Ocean, bringing out the complicated and changing trilateral relations over this area, which has a very bad impact on Sino-Indian cooperation. Only when China and India work to lessen the political influences of historical problems and actively seek pragmatic economic cooperation can an all-round and friendly Sino-Indian relationship be achieved.