With or without global consent, China and India are the rising powers in Asia. After 1962, these two states have experienced enduring rivalries with historical and intricate hostility over the issues of territory, the sanctuary of Tibetan refugees on Indian territory, polarized relations with Pakistan, and geopolitical and resources competition. However, these disagreements have evolved from confrontation to the mixed elements of competition and cooperation to date. Sino-Indian relations have undergone a transformation with momentum toward cooperation on a number of regional and global issues over the last two decades. This thesis aims at exploring why Sino-Indian relations have been transformed from enmity to amity. To do so, I apply the peace and war theory of an international relations theorist, Benjamin Miller, as a main theoretical framework to analyse the transformations of Sino-Indian relations between 1950s and 2013. Thus, this thesis finds alternative explanations of the regional orders to account for why rivals states tend to peacefully coexist, contributing to peace studies. This thesis argues that the transformations of Sino-Indian relations from hot war to cold war, then to cold peace can be contributed to two factors: firstly, the end of superpower competition and the presence of the great powers – Russia, between 1990 and 1999, and the US, after 2000 –imposing regional stability. Secondly, China and India suffered from the problems of a “state-to-nation imbalance”, causing the 1962 war. Moreover, the Sino-Indian relations were characterized by the challenges to the unresolved border disputes associated with China’s Tibet issue, making peace reversible and a high level of warm peace more difficult.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:706391 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Tseng, Lan-Shu |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39523/ |
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