Purvi Narayan
Can Asia’s two giants turn maritime friction into cooperative frameworks?
The Indo-Pacific has emerged as the world’s most consequential geopolitical arena, where the interplay of rivalry and cooperation between India and China will, to a large extent, shape the region’s future. Both nations are not only Asia’s largest economies and militaries but also ancient civilizations with competing visions of maritime order. While China’s expanding naval footprint, port investments and assertive actions in the South China Sea raise alarms in New Delhi, India’s growing partnerships with the United States, Japan and Australia under the Quad are viewed with suspicion in Beijing. The result has been an uneasy mix of competition and mistrust.
Yet, beneath this surface friction lies space for pragmatic cooperation. Geography dictates that both countries remain locked into a shared maritime neighborhood; economics ensures their supply chains, markets and trade routes are intertwined; and climate change underscores the need for joint resilience. Rather than perpetually colliding in the Indo-Pacific, India and China can carve out structured pathways of cooperation that safeguard their interests while contributing to regional stability. Targeted tariff and non-tariff dialogues, product-specific phytosanitary alignment and mutual recognition pilots in pharmaceuticals, medical devices and green tech components could expand the ties.
Economic Corridors: Trade Before Tension
Despite political tensions, China remains India’s largest trading partner in goods, with two-way trade crossing $136 billion in FY 2023–24. Much of this is lopsided, with India importing machinery, electronics and active pharmaceutical ingredients, while exporting raw materials and agricultural goods. The trade imbalance, over $85 billion, fuels strategic anxiety in India.
However, both sides recognize that supply chain resilience cannot emerge from decoupling alone. Targeted cooperation in critical areas such as green technology, digital infrastructure and pharmaceutical raw materials could create mutual gains. Joint working groups under BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) can offer platforms to negotiate standards for electric vehicles, renewable grids and AI governance, domains where both India and China aspire to global leadership. Instead of allowing economic interdependence to harden into vulnerability, structured corridors of cooperation can turn it into leverage for stability.
Ecological Imperatives: Shared Seas, Shared Survival
The Indo-Pacific is not just a theatre of naval maneuvers; it is also an ecological hotspot where climate change, rising sea levels and maritime pollution threaten millions. Both India and China face severe coastal vulnerabilities, think of India’s cyclone-prone eastern seaboard or China’s densely populated delta regions. Moreover, overfishing, coral bleaching and plastic waste are eroding marine ecosystems vital to livelihoods.
Here, cooperation is not optional but existential. A joint India–China “Blue Economy Forum” could pool resources for sustainable fisheries, green port development and disaster early-warning systems. Both countries already invest heavily in renewable energy and could align maritime clean-energy transitions, from offshore wind farms to green hydrogen hubs.
Green finance is emerging as a critical dimension of climate diplomacy between India and China. Both countries, as part of the BASIC coalition, have consistently demanded scaled-up post-2025 climate finance, while India has begun experimenting with sovereign and municipal green bonds under SEBI’s regulatory framework. Such ecological partnerships would not only enhance regional resilience but also soften the perception of the Indo-Pacific as purely a contest of hard power.
Maritime Security: From Flashpoints to Frameworks
Security is the most sensitive and contested domain. India’s concerns over China’s “string of pearls”- a network of port projects in Gwadar, Hambantota and Djibouti- clash with China’s surveillance over India’s role in the Quad and its growing naval presence in the Malacca Strait and Andaman Sea. Maritime collisions, whether literal or diplomatic, are an ever-present risk.
But both navies meet in multilateral formats such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden. Expanding these into regularized India–China maritime dialogues could build transparency, reduce miscalculations and create protocols for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR). Shared mechanisms for responding to oil spills, shipwrecks or regional pandemics would demonstrate that even rivals can work together when the seas turn turbulent.
Multilateral Platforms: Building Habits of Dialogue
The Indo-Pacific is increasingly multipolar, and neither India nor China can dictate outcomes unilaterally. Multilateral institutions- from the East Asia Summit to BRICS, SCO and the G20, offer arenas where both countries can shape rules collectively. India’s presidency of the G20 in 2023 showed its ability to broker consensus across sharp divides, while China continues to anchor financial initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
Embedding maritime cooperation into these multilateral agendas could normalize habits of dialogue. For instance, a BRICS Maritime Task Force could oversee joint capacity-building for smaller littoral states in Southeast Asia and Africa. By focusing on shared global goods- connectivity, sustainable development, financial stability, India and China can reduce the zero-sum character of their interactions in the Indo-Pacific.
From Strategic Collision to Pragmatic Cooperation
India and China’s future in the Indo-Pacific need not be scripted as an inevitable collision course. While competition is natural, outright confrontation would be catastrophic for themselves, for Asia and for the world economy. A more pragmatic pathway lies in selective cooperation: building economic corridors that mitigate vulnerabilities, ecological frameworks that safeguard shared survival, maritime protocols that prevent miscalculation and multilateral platforms that institutionalize dialogue.
The seas between India and China may often appear as contested waters, but they can also serve as connective tissues. By investing in cooperative frameworks, both countries can signal to the region and the world that the Indo-Pacific is not condemned to rivalry alone. Turning maritime friction into maritime collaboration will not be easy, but it is both possible and necessary if Asia’s giants are to coexist in its shared neighborhood.
About the contributor: Purvi Narayan is currently a Host and Visiting Researcher at the Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI). She is a fellow of DFPGYF Diplomacy, Foreign Policy & Geopolitics Youth Fellowship- Cohort 2.0.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
Read more at IMPRI:
India – Nordic Nations: Blue Economy and Maritime Trade
Department Zero: The Undervalued Sub-Basement of the Economy
Acknowledgement: This article was posted by Shivashish Narayan, a visiting researcher at IMPRI.
