China in South Asia’s New Strategic Quadrangle

 

South Asia is one of the least economically integrated regions of the world, but its future can no longer be divorced from broader trends in a dynamic, volatile, yet increasingly integrated Asia. The region’s geopolitics and economics are shifting rapidly. Traditional challenges, not least the complex relationship between India and Pakistan, have been joined by new ones, notably China’s dramatic arrival as a builder, lender, investor, and trader; competitive initiatives aimed at connecting the region’s economies and infrastructure to other parts of Asia; and intensifying military competition between Beijing and New Delhi. Evan Feigenbaum’s career has spanned East, Central, and South Asia, beginning as an academic China specialist but including a stint as the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia during the George W. Bush Administration. In this talk, Feigenbaum will explore China’s changing role in South Asia but especially the complex interaction there among four big powers (“Asia’s new strategic quadrangle”) — India, China, the United States, and Japan.

 

Evan A. Feigenbaum is Vice Chairman of The Paulson Institute, an independent center, located at the University of Chicago, established by former US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. He leads the institute’s economic policy and investment-related programs, focused principally on the Chinese economy with an emphasis on market-based structural reforms. He is also Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Initially an academic, with a Ph.D. in Chinese politics from Stanford University, his work has since spanned government service, think tanks, the private sector, and three regions of Asia – East, Central, and South.

 

From 2001 to 2009, he served at the US State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia, Member of the Policy Planning Staff with principal responsibility for East Asia and the Pacific under Secretaries of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and as an adviser on China to Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, with whom he worked closely in the development of the US-China senior dialogue.

 

During the intensive final phase of the US-India civil nuclear initiative, from July to October 2008, he co-chaired the coordinating team charged with moving the initiative through the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and then to Congress, where it became the US-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act.

 

Outside of government, Dr. Feigenbaum has been Head of the Asia practice group at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consulting firm working principally for financial institutions and corporate clients; Senior Fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations; and taught at Harvard University and the US Naval Postgraduate School. He is the author of three books and monographs, including most recently The United States in the New Asia, and China’s Techno-Warriors, which was selected by Foreign Affairs as a best book of 2003 on the Asia-Pacific, as well as numerous essays.

 

 

 

Beijing’s new Silk Road initiative links old trade corridors from Asia to Africa and Europe. Many perceive that President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative as well as China’s many other trade, investment and finance projects transcend their economic calculus and reflect Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions to reposition China’s standing on the global stage. The China Program brings leading experts to explore the drivers and motivators of China’s international initiatives, their reach and scope as well as the implications of China’s increasing activism on the world stage.

 

RSVP required by 5PM February 20.

 

Patrick Laboon