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Book Cover for: The Costliest Pearl: China's Struggle for India's Ocean, Bertil Lintner

The Costliest Pearl: China's Struggle for India's Ocean

Bertil Lintner

The Indian Ocean's strategic importance to China cannot be underestimated, given the oil, African minerals and container traffic that pass through it. Not since Admiral Zheng He sailed his fleet through these waters in the fifteenth century -- exploring and mapping them in a bid to extend the Celestial Empire's trading and tributary system -- has China been present here.

Beijing's re-entry into the Indian Ocean after 600 years is part of its Belt and Road megaproject, in which it is investing trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects around the Ocean rim and in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles and Mauritius, including a military base in Djibouti. This has touched off a new and dangerous confrontation. Ranged against China is an informal alliance of India, the US, France, Australia, and, predictably, Japan, China's arch rival in the Asia-Pacific.

China is in the Indian Ocean for the long haul and the entry of big-power politics into this sensitive maritime region will shape its future for decades. Bertil Lintner unearths this dramatic story, profiles the key players, examines the economic and naval balance of power and scrutinizes the intense competition to encourage small island nations to align with either New Delhi or Beijing.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Hurst & Co.
  • Publish Date: May 15th, 2019
  • Pages: 288
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.80in - 5.80in - 1.30in - 1.20lb
  • EAN: 9781849049962
  • Categories: World - AsianAsia - ChinaInternational Relations - General

About the Author

Bertil Lintner writes for Asia Times Online and the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. He has numerous books to his credit and is a recognized expert on Burmese issues as well as ethnic minorities, insurgencies and narcotics in Southeast and South Asia. His latest book is China's India War: Collision Course On the Roof of the World.

Praise for this book

"Meticulously chronicled . . . [an] illuminating view from the field."--The Literary Review

"Four-fifths of the container traffic between Asia and the rest of the world, and three-fifths of the world's oil supplies, pass through the Indian Ocean. The new great game takes place here. This book is a comprehensive and enthralling guide to the Ocean's geopolitics, China's designs for the future of the region and the precarious search for balance. Highly recommended."--Bruno Maçães, author of Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

"A detailed and intriguing account of the rising Chinese superpower's Indian Ocean manoeuvres in a budding new cold war among atolls and island states. This is an indispensable reference tool for anyone interested in this region and in the future of our global order."--Lars Ellström, author of Road to Kashgar: Notes from a Walk through China

"Enlightening"--Asian Review of Books

"Lintner's decades of reporting from all over Asia lend him shrewd insight into the region's geography and politics." -- Foreign Affairs

"Lintner's book offers more than an account of Chinese efforts to extend its economic, diplomatic and military presence to the far-flung islands of the Indian Ocean. It is a primer on the history and politics of the Indian Ocean rim largely ignored by the mainstream media."Global Asia