Silk Cage Series – Webinar I: From Corridors to Control: China’s Long Shadow in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region
Debates surrounding China’s expanding role in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) increasingly revolve around a central question: where does connectivity end and strategic control begin? While Beijing frames its engagement as development-oriented and mutually beneficial, critics argue that China is constructing a layered architecture of influence that reshapes political choices, security alignments, and regional order. This debate between partnership and power, opportunity and dependence, lies at the heart of contemporary assessments of China’s neighbourhood and maritime strategy.
Over the past decade, China’s engagement across South Asia and the IOR has evolved from a focus on infrastructure corridors into a broader strategic enterprise. What began as economic outreach through ports, roads, energy projects, and logistics hubs has expanded into a multi-domain presence encompassing political access, security cooperation, maritime reach, and narrative influence. China’s long shadow today stretches seamlessly from continental South Asia into the Indian Ocean, blurring the boundary between land-based neighbourhood strategy and maritime power projection.
This transformation reflects deeper shifts in Chinese foreign policy thinking under Xi Jinping. Beijing’s evolving approach is increasingly articulated through three interlinked global frameworks: the Global Development Initiative (GDI), the Global Security Initiative (GSI), and the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI). Together, these initiatives provide the ideological and strategic scaffolding for China’s external engagement. The GDI legitimises large-scale infrastructure and connectivity as development cooperation; the GSI reframes security through concepts of indivisible security, regime stability, and opposition to external intervention; and the GCI advances China’s normative discourse, emphasising sovereignty, cultural pluralism, and alternative governance models. In South Asia and the IOR, these initiatives operate in tandem: development projects open doors, security partnerships deepen dependence, and civilizational narratives normalise China’s expanding role.
South Asia and the Indian Ocean together constitute a single strategic theatre in this framework. South Asia provides continental access points and political leverage in China’s immediate neighbourhood, while the IOR offers critical sea lines of communication, energy routes, and pathways for sustained maritime presence. The Belt and Road Initiative functions as the connective tissue binding these spaces. Flagship projects such as the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, port development in Sri Lanka, infrastructure financing in Bangladesh, and growing Chinese footprints in the Maldives demonstrate how land-based corridors are complemented by maritime nodes. Over time, these engagements have generated structural asymmetries-debt exposure, reliance on Chinese capital and technology, elite-level alignment, and long-term contractual commitments-that increasingly shape the strategic autonomy of participating states.
A central debate explored in this webinar concerns the nature of control embedded in China’s approach. Rather than seeking overt territorial dominance, Beijing exercises influence indirectly through standards, finance, port access, security cooperation, and diplomatic alignment. The expansion of security ties under the GSI framework, including military exchanges and policing cooperation, reinforces economic engagement and creates cumulative leverage that is difficult to reverse. Control thus emerges not through force, but through embeddedness.
Another contested issue is agency. Smaller South Asian and Indian Ocean states actively seek Chinese investment to meet development needs, yet their room for strategic manoeuvre may narrow as dependencies deepen. India, meanwhile, confronts a dual challenge: managing China’s expanding continental presence in its neighbourhood while responding to a growing maritime footprint across the Indian Ocean. These dynamics collectively reshape regional balance, deterrence, and crisis stability.
For external actors such as the European Union, Japan, and the United States, China’s integrated South Asia–IOR strategy raises fundamental questions about regional order, connectivity norms, and security governance. Alternative initiatives exist, but often struggle to match China’s scale, speed, and political coherence. Understanding how Beijing converts connectivity into control, underpinned by its global initiatives, is therefore essential for credible engagement. The Stockholm Center for South Asia and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) aims to address some of these issues through a series of webinars, titled ‘Silk Cage Series’. This webinar series is a part of the SCSA-IPA’s research project titled, ‘The Silk Noose: China’s Power Architecture in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region’.
This first webinar of the ‘Silk Cage Series’ situates South Asia and the Indian Ocean within China’s evolving strategic architecture. Moving beyond binaries of cooperation versus coercion, it examines how development, security, and narrative frameworks interact, and how China’s long shadow may shape the future order of the South Asian–Indian Ocean space.
This webinar will address the following questions in general:
- How do Xi Jinping’s Global Development, Security, and Civilization Initiatives shape China’s engagement in South Asia and the IOR?
2. At what point does connectivity translate into strategic dependence and indirect control?
3. How much agency do South Asian and Indian Ocean states retain amid China’s layered influence architecture?
4. What are the implications of China’s land–sea strategy for India’s (and other countries’) continental and maritime security?
5. How should the EU, Japan, and the US respond to China’s integrated development–security–narrative approach?
Speakers:
Dr. Angela Stanzel is a Senior Associate in the Asia Research Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Her research topics include China’s foreign and security policy, and in particular EU-China relations as well as Cross-Strait relations. Before joining SWP, she was a Senior Policy Fellow in the Asia Program and the representative in Germany of Institut Montaigne. She was also the editor of the institute’s quarterly publication, China Trends. Prior to that, Angela Stanzel worked as Senior Policy Fellow and editor of China Analysis in the Asia Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin. She earned her PhD in Sinology at the Free University of Berlin in 2013. Her dissertation focused on China-Pakistan relations.
John S. Van Oudenaren is a research analyst at BluePath Labs specializing in Chinese foreign and security affairs. He was previously China Brief editor at the Jamestown Foundation and held roles at the National Bureau of Asian Research, the Asia Society Policy Institute, and the National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs. John holds an MA (Asian Studies) from the George Washington University and a BA (history) from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His areas of research focus include China’s approach to major power relations, Chinese-led multilateral initiatives such as BRI and GSI, and China’s defense industrial base.
Dr. Jiayi Zhou is a Senior Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Her research is at the intersection of sustainable development and great power competition, with a particular focus on resource security. She has held fellowships with the Bank of Finland Institute for Transition Economics (BOFIT), Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, Pacific Forum CSIS, and elsewhere. She is published in academic outlets in addition to her policy-related research, including Political Geography, Critical Security Studies, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, and Journal of Peacebuilding and Development. She holds a PhD in Environmental Science.
Professor Masayuki Masuda, head of the China Division at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS) in Japan. Professor Masayuki Masuda joined the NIDS in April 2003 as a research fellow and served as head of the Government & Law Division and Asia & Africa Division. He became head of the China Division at NIDS in April, 2024. Professor Masuda also held visiting fellowship positions at the East-West Center and Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in 2015-16. In 2023-2025, he served as the Partner country Project Director (PPD) for a NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme (SPS) project looking at futures in the Indo-Pacific.
Dr. Scott N. Romaniuk is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Asia Studies, Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS), and the Institute of Global Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest, as well as a Senior Researcher at the Africa Research Institute, Óbuda University, Hungary. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at The Dialogue, India. He holds a PhD in International Studies from the University of Trento, Italy. His research focuses on international relations, geopolitics, and critical security studies, with particular emphasis on the Middle East, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific. His current work examines the governance of emerging technologies, their role in great power politics, and their implications for regional and global security, including terrorism and counter-terrorism. He is the editor of several forthcoming volumes, including The Palgrave Handbook of Geopolitics and Security in the Indo-Pacific (Springer, in press), The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and National Security (Routledge, in press), and Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing through Hawala Money Transfer Operators (Springer, in press).
Moderator:
Dr. Jagannath Panda is the Head of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) at the Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP), Sweden. Dr. Panda is also a Senior Fellow at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies in the Netherlands. As a senior expert on China, East Asia, and Indo-Pacific affairs, Prof. Panda has testified to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission at the US Congress on ‘China and South Asia’. He is the Series Editor for Routledge Studies on Think Asia.