Over the past few years, South Asia has seen an unprecedented increase in relations with China, which has cut across economic, diplomatic, and strategic interests. While China’s connection to the region goes centuries back; South Asian ports having formed crucial links in the Maritime Silk Route linking China with the Roman Empire, China’s recent One Belt, One Road (OBOR) policy, has sought to reengage and further heighten connectivity and cooperation among countries from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea.
This has significantly contributed towards enhanced Chinese presence in South Asia. This amplified “connectivity” has expanded the discourse around China’s presence in the region to more than security, and led to enhanced trade, technology, development and cultural connections. Furthermore, the effects of globalization have led to a mass diffusion of boundaries. South Asia’s presence in China too has increased with spread of South Asian cultural staples such as the introduction of Bollywood and Indian gastronomy in China. In the recent past, efforts have been made to boost South Asian exports to China, while China's largest number of foreign tourists hail from across Asia. Not only does these phenomena imply an enriched relationship between China and South Asia’s respective nations, it also has significant potential to transform the interactions within the South Asia region, and its character, on the whole. Particularly given that population sizes of 1.3 billion (2013) in China and 1.7 billion (2014) in South Asia, these two entities together have massive potential in the above fields.
The ChinaSA-SAChina (China in South Asia, South Asia in China) platform, in this context, recognizes that China and South Asia together exhibit a multifaceted set of interactions, discourses, policies and practices, with an ever changing dynamics and significant implications for Asia. It attempts to aggregate and bring together media content, key statistics and data, and other material related to the cultural, economic and political relationship between China and the region as a whole.
