"How Does the World Deal with a Resurgent China?"

Speaker: Baladas Ghoshal

Time: Wednesday, September 4th, 2024 at 5:00 PM

Location (Hybrid):  Coble Hall Room #108 and Zoom

Abstract:

Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world's fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5% through 2018, a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major country”. This has enabled Beijing to build world’s third largest military power with strong industrial and technological base. At sea, China has the world’s largest navy with a battle force of more than 300 ships and submarines. The Chinese launched their third aircraft carrier in the past year and commissioned their third amphibious assault ship. The PLA air force “rapidly catching up to Western air forces”. More importantly, its initial peaceful rise has given way to a more forceful, assertive and bellicose China willing to challenge the existing international order. The rise of China has changed the global landscape of power, both economic and strategic, forcing readjustments.

How has the world been dealing with a resurgent China? The responses ranged from finding opportunities in its emergence as the global manufacturing, supply chain hub and a major source of capital, especially for those countries desperately needing it for their rapid economic development and thereby ensuring political legitimacy, to viewing it as a major challenge and even a threat to their national security requiring push back or hedging. Again, responses varies from country to country and regions to regions. For countries adjacent to China and having territorial and water disputes with it, the challenges and responses are even more complex than countries that are far away from it. What is common between all of them that each adopts some forms of cooperation, competition and conflict characterizing their approaches in dealing with China?  In my presentation, I will concentrate more on the Asian countries’ approaches in dealing with Beijing.

Biography: 

Baladas Ghoshal, a doyen of Southeast Asian Stuies in India, currently Secretary General Society for Indian Ocean Studies; until recently ICCR Chair in Indian Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, is also honorary Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies and a Visiting Senior Fellow in Centre for Policy Research. From August 2016, he is also a Visiting Professor of Public Policy in Amity University, Noida. Professor Ghoshal is a former Professor of Southeast Asia and South-West Pacific Studies and Chairman of the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Between 2004 and 2007, he was a Visiting Professor of International Relations first at the International Christian University, Tokyo and then at Nagoya City University, taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1990-91) National University of Malaysia (1998-1999), University of Malaya (2000) and the Universiti Utara Malaysia (2002-2003). He has held Senior Fulbright Fellowships at the Cornell and Rutgers Universities (1983-84); Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore (1985-86); Centre for Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong (Sept.-Oct.2003), East West Centre (2010), Consultant to the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (November 2003-February2004). Professor Ghoshal is a doyen in Southeast Asian Studies programme in India. He has published extensively on Indonesian politics, ASEAN and regional security issues, reads, writes and speaks Malay and Bahasa Indonesia. Also published on Indian and Bangladesh politics and foreign policy. His most recent publications are a book on India-Indonesia Relations published by the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore, and a monograph on China’s Perception of India’s Look East Policy, brought out by Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, New Delhi & an edited volume on Indo-Pacific: Peace and Cooperation or Conflict?