Introduction: India and China in Comparative Perspective: Emerging Asian and Global Powers

The aim of this paper is to entangle the comparative political economic relations between India and China by first exploring some theoretical ideas and then attempting to outline the bilateral and strategic foreign policy ties where unresolved (border) issues still haunt the relationship at the same time as there seems to be a convergence in development models; the intention is then to discuss the intertwined geopolitical and geo-economic foreign policy alignments in the global context where both countries share similar interests when it comes to opposing the United States and European Union in climate change policy, world trade and to a certain extent in security and energy matters. However, disagreement persists on unresolved problems in terms of attracting FDI and other economic issues such as resources and energy. When it comes to the regional Asia settings, the global alignment and foreign policy convergence appears to be replaced by a much more competitive relation in strategic terms and the two entities act more as rivals for regional hegemony than as potential allies. As a tentative conclusion to the paper, a discussion of possible perspectives is provided by pointing to the soft versus hard power diplomatic relationship between the two countries.