754 { China’s Quest
Early in 2014, the PLA-N pushed still further into new maritime territory when
three ships that were part of the antipiracy patrols transited the Sunda and
Lombok straights for the first time, as shown in Figure 27-1. From India’s per-
spective, it faced a much denser Chinese military presence virtually all around
its perimeter.
In fall 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled a plan for large-scale construc-
tion of ports and associated free trade zones at ports in Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Dubbed a “maritime Silk Road,” the plan called
for funding by China’s government, to be followed by Chinese investment
and expanded trade.^38
China’s escalating naval presence in the Indian Ocean caused unease in
India. The traditional advantages the Indian navy held arising from the tyr-
anny of distance confronting the PLA-N in that ocean was steadily being
eroded. As a former Indian foreign secretary wrote:
The port facilities China is obtaining or building [around the Indian
Ocean littoral] ... raise concerns about China encircling us physically
and politically, changing our bilateral equation further to our disadvan-
tage... China will, inevitably, follow up with its commercial footholds
in the Indian Ocean with naval ones. The purpose of China’s naval ex-
pansion is precisely to create strategic space for itself in [the] Western
Pacific and then move into the Indian Ocean gradually, in preparation
for which China is learning to operate far from its shores for quite some
time now, in the Gulf of Aden, for instance.^39
India responded to China’s growing Indian Ocean activity by stepping
up maritime cooperation with the United States and with Japan. The United
States was India’s most important security partner, but it was the India-Japan
link that pointed most clearly toward the deepening alignment of China’s
neighbors to countervail its growing strength. India-Japan naval coopera-
tion began in 2000 and expanded slowly over the next decade.^40 In 2012, the
Indian and Japanese navies conducted their first-ever bilateral exercise off
Japan’s east coast. The next year, the two countries began a maritime affairs
dialogue. Significantly, the Indian delegation to the dialogue included rep-
resentatives from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, a body with responsibili-
ties for satellite remote sensing, a core technology for finding and tracking
ships at sea (or undersea). In 2013, the second Japan-India joint naval exer-
cise took place in the Bay of Bengal. The next year, India agreed to Japan’s
participation in the Indo-US Malabar naval exercises. India had first con-
sented to Japanese participation in the Malabar exercises in 2007 and again
in 2009, but Beijing’s protests had caused New Delhi to pull back from such
forward-leaning cooperation. India’s 2014 acceptance of Japan’s participation
in the annual Indo-US exercise was a move to offset the escalating PLA-N
presence in the Indian Ocean. The big picture was this: confronting growing