Description
Despite identifying China’s growing assertiveness as a threat to their strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific, India’s and Japan’s policy responses to a rising China and the intensifying China-US competition are frequently inconsistent and/or contradictory. Why? The existing IR literature has frequently conceptualized Indian and Japanese foreign policy behaviour as a coherent form of statecraft. Conversely, I argue that incoherent policy responses are the reflections of underlying tensions in both political economies. Focusing on India’s and Japan’s response to China-US competition in infrastructure and technology networks via the state transformation approach and the literature on power asymmetries in networks, I posit that state transformation processes have reshaped state-capital relations in ways that make states increasingly dependent on the support from private capital for policy development and implementation. If interests converge, a coherent strategic policy approach becomes possible. When the interests between state institutions and the private sector diverge, however, policy becomes inconsistent and contradictory as state institutions aim to reconcile the diverging interests of different social forces within the state. The paper highlights that despite a much-discussed return to more statist forms of development, private corporations may be becoming even more powerful than they were before.
