China’s assertive actions across the Indo-Pacific are set to bring the US closer to regional partners such as India, who are also better placed to win the race to develop the next generation of critical technologies, experts said during a session at the 21st edition of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Saturday.

Minxin Pei, a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a leading expert on US-China relations, said that the ties between Washington and Beijing were in a “downward spiral with occasional pauses”, though the leadership of both countries are not interested in or planning for an immediate conflict.

Lisa Curtis, the director of the Indo-Pacific security program at the Center for a New American Security, said the US is focusing on building up partnerships and alliances in the region in the face of China’s assertiveness, including denial of air and sea access. The US-India relationship has made tremendous progress in security and technology cooperation despite occasional differences on issues such as the Ukraine war, she said.

Referring to the India-China military standoff on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that began in 2020, Curtis added: “While China may have been trying to signal to India not to go too far with the Quad or not to go too far with the US-India relationship, I think that border crisis had the opposite impact.”

Pei said the biggest driver for the realignment of relations in the Indo-Pacific is the sense that China wants to be accorded more deference and respect and have its interests given more space on the back of its economic clout. “But this is a demand that other countries find difficult to accept because the Chinese definition of interests is not the same as other countries’ definition of interests,” he said.

The elites in China and the US have concluded that “the other is their mortal existential threat”, said Pei, who highlighted several times the catastrophic consequences of any potential conflict between the two powers. He also urged the leaders of other countries to convey to China and the US the need for cooler heads to prevail. “There will be shocks to this relationship coming on, but the good thing is that they look into the abyss and they think this is not where they want to go,” he added.

In the context of new partnerships being forged by the US in the Indo-Pacific, Curtis pointed to the growing importance of the Quad, which groups India, Australia, Japan and the US. The goal is to make the Quad the premier regional grouping in the region and the four countries meet at the summit level every year and have established dozens of working groups on issues ranging from maritime security to technology and critical minerals.

“I think this is succeeding and we know it’s succeeding because the Chinese don’t like the Quad. They call it an Asian Nato, they say the US is taking us back to a Cold War era, which it’s not. The Quad is not a military grouping, but it is about four powerful democracies coming together, pooling their resources and capabilities so that they can shape the future order of this important region,” she said.

Curtis described China as “its own worst enemy” and said its maritime aggression and “gray zone activities” in the South China Sea, which are designed to intimidate and coerce without provoking a military response, had pushed countries such as the Philippines closer to the US. The Philippines has agreed to expand the number of bases the US can access, including a base in Luzon that is about 240 km from Taiwan.

Pei also highlighted the role of President Xi Jinping in shaping Beijing’s assertive policies and said a “grand bargain” between China and the US is unlikely as long as he is in power. While many changes in China’s foreign policy occurred around 2010, they were amorphous and unorganised and Xi “brought everything together”, he said.

Curtis said the India-US technology partnership has been driven by a desire not to allow China to dominate on the technological front and to control the information era, while Pei said the US and its allies are in a much better position than China to win the next technological race.

The world in which China made enormous progress in technology has changed and Beijing will have to acquire technologies and make scientific breakthroughs on its own, “which is very, very hard”, Pei said. “My feeling is that the outside world has overestimated China’s ability and probably China has overestimated its own ability,” he said.