By dint of population size and land area alone, India and China are often thought of as two “Asian giants” headed toward inevitable rivalry as incipient superpowers, with the outcome being either a great clash or one successfully sidelining the other. In a recent Financial Times op-ed (June 5, 2017), Gideon Rachman, that newspaper’s senior foreign-policy correspondent, suggests that these are very likely future options because the countries are not just any old superpowers: “China and India represent not just rival powers but also rival political systems, ideologies, even civilisations.” In other words, the world is not big enough for both of them. What is crucial, of course, is whether this is also the view of influential insiders who embark on policies to realize their national geopolitical ambitions at the expense of the other, or just that of Western observers whose theoretical predilections lead them to see emerging hegemonies doomed to conflict.
This book, a collaborative effort by a group of scholars deeply involved in developing an international relations theory steeped in the perspectives and practices of the two civilizations to which contemporary India and China are heirs, intervenes in the preceding debate to suggest a reframing of it. The contributors seek to shift what is at stake away from the commonplaces of the “Westphalian drama” that emphasizes the absolute territoriality of modern statehood to “nonstate, transnational social relations” (p. 2) that are particularly apparent in the daily lives of the borderlands between India and China. It is to the borders between the two states that the authors look to challenge conventional theoretical wisdom. In presenting the borders as “capillaries,” the intention is to highlight the extent to which the ancient civilizational traditions of the two sides are complementary in suggesting ways of transcending rather than institutionalizing conflicts.
India China is organized into seven chapters. The first by Lily Ling lays out the overall perspective, particularly the silences or absences governing discussion of the borders between India and China. The five following chapters each address specific themes related to rethinking India—China relations from the border, so to speak. The first, by Adriana Erthal Abdenur, explores the history of Trans-Himalayan connections from the Silk Road era until World War II. Mahendra Lama then lays out how much trading opportunities have grown between locals in northeast India and southwest China in recent years. In the third substantive chapter, Nimmi Kurian explores growing institutional linkages across the borders at the subregional level. Payal Banerjee and Li Bo then examine the role of subregional nongovernmental organizations in challenging hydropower schemes with cross-border implications, with the coauthors representing each “side” in the discussion of the environmental sustainability of “big” projects sponsored by centralized national governments whose political systems seem anything but different on this issue.
Of the substantive chapters, it is Ling’s Chapter 5 that explicitly raises the issue of moving beyond the border capillaries that are the subject of the other chapters into a discussion of the cultural specificities of India and China. Arguably, most of what is written in the other chapters could be written about borders anywhere in the world. Ling’s chapter is critical to the enterprise of the book as a whole because it lays out the historic communality between principles of ayurveda and zhongyi, derivative of yoga and acupuncture, respectively, as metaphorical terms for confronting the “border pathology” (p. 103) that has afflicted India—China relations since 1962. The focus is on the idea of a “mirrored history” (pp. 103–4) for curing the “personality disorder” (p. 109) that afflicts the borderlands between India and China. Thus, the emphasis on balance, flow, resonance, and “interbeing” characteristic of both disciplines is used to recommend a regionally shared therapy for what ails the region.
A concluding chapter, written by the authors as a collective, summarizes the main arguments of the book through the lens of Ling’s last chapter. There are perhaps two arguments that are most important. The first is that India and China ought to be seen as “civilizational twins” (p. 127) rather than as competitors. The second, drawn from the substantive chapters, concerns how to think about international relations as a whole. The authors argue that considering different geographical scales, such as borderlands, enables a challenge to the binaries of conventional theories in which there is always simply a singular “India” and a singular “China.” Ideas drawn from Asian historical practice provide different norms for governing interstate behavior than those associated with the Westphalian model (particularly balance versus violence), and case studies such as those reported in this book can help us rethink theorizing in international relations.
This work is innovative in a number of registers. It is truly a collaborative venture, even if Ling’s voice is the one that gives the book its main impetus. The emphasis on the epistemic, or the notion that how we think about the world influences what we can do in it, is also important. In this regard, the specific focus on “bordering” as a vitally important moment of state formation is worth identifying as a major contribution of this work. Finally, I think we can all agree that the political futures of India and China are crucial to world politics in the years ahead. The book clearly lays out a road map for remaking India—China relations beyond national capitals and the calculi of the dominant elites. This is obviously a challenge that will only be taken up if influential movements and individuals are up to the task.
There are a couple of difficulties with how the main argument is made that could be addressed in subsequent work. One is in using the Westphalian model, which is associated with dominant genres in international relations theory, instead of discussing actual political practice in India and China. This distinction is elided in the text by suggesting that Western theory and the real world of international relations essentially come down to the same thing. In fact, I think one could show that in both India and China, the approaches to world politics are not simply reflections of some dominant Western narrative, but are based on encounters between their interpretations of indigenous principles and dominant practices.
The second problem is that, as Martyn Bayly reminds us (“Imagining New Worlds: Forging ‘Non-Western’ International Relations in Late Colonial India,” British Academy Review 30 [Summer 2017]: 50–53), trying to reorient IR theory around non-Western ideas about the balance of power and so on has a long history. Although there is one footnote citation (p. 19) to a book on the commonality between Hindu and Daoist political philosophies, by the innovative scholar Benoy Kumar Sarkar (who in 1919 also published a paper in the American Political Science Review entitled “Hindu Theory of International Relations,” for example), this book does not offer much by way of a review of prior efforts to rethink international relations from the East.
It is all too easy to be churlish about a book that is in part experimental and as a result inevitably inconclusive. Make no mistake about it: this is an exemplary text in opening up debate about the limits of dominant thinking about international relations, and pointing beyond it to a vital context of global significance.
