Content area
Full Text
Before the United States implemented the “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe had already recognized the importance of connecting the Indian and the Pacific Oceans and tried to align with India, Australia, and the United States when he first came to power in 2006. However, with little interest from India and Australia, and the Democratic Party of Japan’s subsequent scramble to deal with natural disasters and island disputes, the discussion of the “Indo-Pacific” in Japan has been relatively rare (Qiao Liang 2022). Subsequently, this idea was picked up by the United States, which can be traced back to the speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, emphasizing the importance of the Indo-Pacific region to global trade and commerce. When Shinzo Abe came to power again at the end of 2012, he put forward the concept of “Asia’s Democratic Security Diamond.” He then formally proposed the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Framework” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2016) in August 2016. After Donald Trump took office in the United States, under the promotion of Shinzo Abe, the United States renounced former US president Barack Obama’s Asia-Pacific Rebalancing Strategy and launched the Indo-Pacific strategy, attempting to bring China’s neighboring countries and regions together to contain China.
As the Indo-Pacific strategy was elevated from a concept to a foreign policy strategy of the United States, the response of the Chinese government and academics is also changing. The official Chinese attitude has shifted from a more open and neutral attitude toward the concept to a critical one. First, in the beginning, the Chinese government recognized there are multiple versions of the Indo-Pacific strategy advocated by different countries and now it is believed that the Indo-Pacific strategy is mainly dominated by the United States. Second, it was believed that the Indo-Pacific strategy could go in two directions: opening up or exclusivity. It is a matter of choice. There is a gradual consensus that the Indo-Pacific strategy is to create an exclusive, antagonistic, and divisive clique, and it is mainly a tool for the United States to contain China. Third, official responses were rare in the beginning. Now, the responses are publicly direct opposition, name-calling, and criticism of its clear intention to contain China.
Chinese scholars’...