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January 29, 2010

“The United States and Sino-Indian Maritime Rivalry” Panel Discussion at Library of Congress on Feb. 22

As China and India emerge as great powers, they are beginning to transform the maritime security politics in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans. A panel discussion at the Library of Congress will examine the naval dynamic among China, India and the United States and the implications for the maritime balance of power in Asia.

The Library’s John W. Kluge Center will present "The United States and Sino-Indian Maritime Rivalry" at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 22, in Room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are needed.

The moderator for the panel discussion is C. Raja Mohan, holder of the Henry Alfred Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Kluge Center. Mohan is professor of South Asian studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

According to Mohan, China and India—discarding their traditional continental orientation—are building powerful navies that can operate far from their shores. They are rubbing against each other in different parts of the Indian and Pacific oceans, and their enduring rivalry along the Great Himalayas is now spilling over to the high seas. The Sino-Indian maritime contestation draws in the United States, the dominant naval power in the region.

Participants in the panel discussion are Michael J. Green and Ashley J. Tellis. Green is a senior adviser and holder of the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and an associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University. Green has served as special assistant to President George W. Bush for national security affairs and as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

Tellis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in international security, defense and Asian strategic issues. While on assignment to the U.S. Department of State as senior adviser to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, he was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

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PR 10-024
01/29/10
ISSN 0731-3527

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