The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is becoming increasingly significant in the world arena, with the United States, India and China—the most important stakeholders in the region—playing substantial roles. Judging from the three countries' strategic thought, concerns, interests and power balances, it is the US–India potential competition for maritime dominance in the IOR that demands the most attention. However, competition does not mean confrontation.

The strum and drang that has accompanied China's arrival as a major economic and diplomatic actor in Africa has divided the continent into advocates, alarmists and analysts. 1 For the advocates, the integration of China into the African architecture is one to be promoted as an alternative to the tired policy pronouncements of an increasingly enervated West, not least because of the practical rationale that Beijing has the financial means and political will to invest in Africa's future.

AResurgent China: South Asian Perspective, edited by Tan Tai Yong and S.D. Muni, is a timely book. The simultaneous rise of India and China is a defining reality of the Asian and global order. The trajectory of Sino-Indian relations will have an impact on South Asia. Since the mid-1980s, the two countries have made efforts to unfreeze the relationship, and in the last 10 years the Sino-Indian bilateral relationship has been transformed politically and economically.

The responses to the arguments that I forwarded in my initial essay, ‘China in SAARC? To What Effect?’, have introduced interesting dimensions to this debate. While most of the respondents have agreed with my proposition that it is premature to think about China's entry into the South Asian regionalist project and that it would introduce complex challenges that would be difficult to manage, they disagree with some of the reasons that I have cited.