Welcome everyone for coming to the India and China at sea conference competition and coexistence in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain. We've got a full program today and some fantastic speakers from some of them from a long way away and I'll introduce them later a little bit later. First of all I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. So again thank you for coming and I'd like to thank both the Australia India Institute and the National Security College for their support in holding this event and as I'll mention later this is a project that's been developing for two years with the generous financial assistance of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation. So first of all I'd like to introduce Professor Craig Jeffrey who's the director and CEO of the Australia India Institute to say a few words about the Australia India Institute and just to start this project off. Thanks. As you can probably hear I'm a Brit but I've been in Australia now for a year and intend to stay here. I love the country and my adopted home Melbourne. I play the role of leading the Australia India Institute which is primarily based in Melbourne but I wanted to tell you a little bit about it because I'm aware that not all of you in the room will know about the Institute and its activity but also because I think there's quite a lot of connections between the commitments of the Institute and some of the commitments that underpin discussions today. So the Institute was established in 2008 with a grant from the Commonwealth government. We're now funded by a series of universities across Australia particularly the University of Melbourne and the Commonwealth government and the Victoria State government are mandated to improve relationships between Australia and India through sponsoring research, engaging with government and business and through various forms of public outreach. We're in a stage at the moment of upscaling which is very exciting so we're having a lot of appointments to the Institute. One of the things I draw your attention to and in conversations outside of formal proceedings I'd be very interested in hearing people's views on how this enterprise can work. We have ten so called new generation network scholars starting at a range of Australian universities and in various cities across the country over the next six months and this is a group of their three year postdoctoral researchers who are going to be studying different aspects of contemporary India including security but what ranged across a wide portfolio of interests so we've got someone start working on smart cities, smart infrastructure, public health, sport, government, security, social science. This is a really exciting experiment in revitalizing South Asia related work in Australia in a context where I think it's fair to say that Indian studies is not as strong now as it was in the 1980s. Certainly if you're an undergraduate student wanting to learn about India there aren't the same opportunities that there were even 25 years ago. I think my reason for being excited about today and David your conference and I know that comes out of collaborative work with Rory and my predecessor Amitabh Mathew is that it provides in miniature a nice example of some of the commitments that underpin our work at the AII. First of all and this will be very obvious to many of you who work in IR but forgive me as an anthropologist coming into this arena the commitment to comparison and the commitment not just to comparing A and B but also what I would term connective comparison thinking about how changes in A affect changes in B and it strikes me that that type of lateral imagination is increasingly important in the contemporary moment obviously but also an important component to bring into our teaching in a context where we're often telling students to go deep investigate in depth to think linearly in relation to particular countries certainly that's part of my teaching commitment as a geographer and anthropologist but less often are we interested actually in lateral connections and challenging students to think about how for example changes in public policy in India might affect changes in public policy in Australia or China a second aspect of today's conference that I think is really exciting is its interdisciplinary nature and I think it's important to continue to think about how different disciplines can contribute to the conversation about security and also to actually definitions of what security itself might entail both with a security with a capital S and security with a small S and I was talking to Rory about this this morning and one thing that I think is really important and interesting about national security college is its commitment to thinking about security in quite Catholic and ecumenical ways and the third reason why I'm excited today again this will be obvious to many in the room is the capacity the potential it provides for opening up a whole range of conversations between people in academia and in various other sectors and one of the privileges of working as director of the AII is I meet a series of people who to my model very nicely what it is to be a public intellectual in the contemporary world people who are amphibious move across government academia the metaphor doesn't work as amphibious only implies two things but I'm actually thinking about people who move across multiple spheres between government academia business and other areas so I'm tremendously excited about today's program I hope I get an opportunity to talk to you some of you on the sidelines as well do remember the Australia India Institute we're open for business look at our website we have great events almost every two days not just in Melbourne but in other national centres so thank you very much and I hope the conference goes very well look forward to proceedings. Now if I could ask the head of the national security college Rory Medcalf to give a bit of an introduction to not only the project but some words about how it sits with the evolving concept of the Indo Pacific. Thank you thanks very much David and it's also a great pleasure to welcome Craig Jeffrey as our collaborator on this project. Welcome to you all I might say to begin with that I'm really struck and impressed by the breadth and the scale of the turnout and the quality of the turnout for today's event just looking around the room so many familiar faces colleagues from academia government the policy community in Australia and internationally including our international delegates and perspectives from India China and elsewhere are especially welcome today so I want to say a few more words of welcome I guess from the perspective of the national security college where we sit at the moment and also from a personal perspective about this project a few words about this project and then I'd like to introduce a few of the questions that will frame our day of discussions questions that will be familiar to many of you but questions that are probably not asked often enough about the changing power balance in our region what it means for all countries in the Indo Pacific but of course from an Australian perspective in particular. So I guess the quality of the turnout and the scale of the turnout at this small conference today shows that there is serious interest in questions about the future balance of power in our region going beyond I guess the often narrowly conceived by bilateral or bipolar situation of the United States and China and of course on a day like today when a few of you no doubt will be looking at looking at screens somewhere along the line around noon today to watch what should be a truly fascinating presidential debate in the United States I think it's worth remembering that there are more countries that matter in Australia's constellation of power relationships in the world other than the United States and indeed China now of course China is one of the two countries we're speaking about today on India and China at sea but there's a really interesting context for this and you'll see for example as well as the splendid banners of the National Security College in the Australia India Institute a banner from a research project that the National Security College has been holding in a range in a range of directions in recent years about understanding the Indo Pacific regional context for Australia's security. We held a number of other conferences earlier this year including one I think in around March where a few of our speakers were also present looking in particular at a multi-polar Indo Pacific not only at the roles of China and India but also of Indonesia of Japan a strong Japanese dimension to that particular conference which we held with partnership from the Japanese Embassy but also other powers Singapore Malaysia you know the list goes on the Republic of Korea which has also deep engagement across this region I think the the key point being that for Australia our security future as with our economic future is going to be moored in a set of relationships among multiple powers where we're sheer scale in terms of GDP or military power at any given time is not going to be the only measure of the only measure of relative influence but of course when it comes to India and China the two countries that we're looking at today and studying today scale is indeed a big part of the reason for us seeking to understand the changing dynamics of how they will engage with each other as their interests expand as they continue to grow as trading and investment powers in the Indo Pacific region and indeed as the military dimension of their behavior and the security dimension of their behavior across this super region continues to become more and more evident it's quite striking for me as someone who's worked as an Australian analyst in this space for many years to watch a few of the I guess the historic moments over the past 10 years where we've seen both China and India become much more present as security powers in this maritime region that is Australia's region so for example the fact that in 2008 when both India and China in pretty quick succession became very active in counter piracy activities in the Gulf of Avon or in the Indian Ocean around the Gulf of Avon naval deployments that have continued to this day the fact that China and India and many other countries in the region now have what is beginning to approach a permanent naval presence a permanent military presence essentially at the edge of at the edge of Africa in China's case a naval presence in the Indian Ocean for the first time in 600 years the interesting intriguing range of deployments patrols and exercises that the Chinese Navy is conducted in the Indian Ocean in recent years including with multiple classes of submarines including with surface action groups that have operated or conducted exercises in the vicinity of Australia's Indian Ocean territories a really big change in the way we understand our region and the fact that India as well as China have emerged as competitors to one another but also as potential partners in the provision of public goods in maritime and international security whether it's counter piracy whether it's developing some kind of shared operating picture of these sea lanes where our energy interests where our trade interests where our economic interests all become so intermeshed I think it means that the questions that have been asked in the conference today are absolutely timely now for researchers in this room who've worked in this space for a number of years and I note for example I think Lee Kordner entered the room early on and I recall attending a conference that you convened on a topic that foreshadowed this I think seven or eight or nine years ago so these aren't new questions but they're becoming much more pressing how will China and India engage with one another as two of the three largest economies as two of the three most substantial military powers this century in a increasingly and increasingly shared maritime region that is close to Australia's region of interest now when David and I and others began this research project that David has led a number of years ago with support from the MacArthur Foundation as part of its wider support of Asian security research we developed a framework I guess based on some earlier research that I was involved in looking at a continuum of everything from conflict at one end of the spectrum all the way through to cooperation at the other and of course if you read all of the official public diplomatic documents of various countries cooperation is always what they talk about but in fact true cooperation based on strategic trust is really really hard and there's often quite an absence of it in the relationship between India and China including for some very understandable historic reasons these are countries after all that that have fought a land war within the lifetimes of much of their populations nuclear armed neighbours the Pakistan issue obviously adds a whole lot of complexity to the India-China relationship there is a pretty substantial degree of mistrust so cooperation at one I think rather idealised end of the spectrum conflict at the other but what we're really interested I think in studying today is what lies in between how do these countries manage strategic competition how will that affect the interests of others whether it's of smaller countries such as Australia whether it's of the great powers of the region and the world how will the interests of the United States be affected Japan and others Indonesia and others so really I would suggest where we can we try to understand today what coexistence looks like in the India-China relationship how perhaps those countries can get to a degree of predictability or stability beyond coexistence in the interests of all countries in the region what mutual respect looks like in that relationship and I stress the the mutual nature of that it has to be it has to be mutual and what competition looks like what strategic competition looks like it's purely in a military dimension does it have other dimensions that we need to study again how will it wrap up the interests of other countries and how perhaps do we try to shift the spectrum towards perhaps somewhere between coexistence and cooperation but in ways that respect the sovereignty and interests of other countries in the region and of course avoiding the sea at the other end of the spectrum conflict between two major maritime powers that are going to be increasingly active and present in our region so if I'll leave my opening remarks there I think just to emphasise that we are working on the record today as I think David will reinforce a few times throughout the day so please be as frank and open as you can in your questions but you are being recorded for the research interests of a much wider group of viewers so I'll introduce David Brewster who as well as being the convener of this research project is a senior research fellow here at the National Security College also wears a number of hats in the the research space in Australia including I think as a fellow at the Australia India Institute I've known David for quite a few years now as really one of Australia's leading thinkers and researchers on the strategic implications of the rise of India I think David's in my research interests overlap we agree on most things although I'm sure we find a few things that we disagree on throughout the day but David's books particularly on India as an Indian Ocean power and India as an Asia Pacific power should be compulsory reading for anyone studying the strategic dynamics of the Indo-Pacific and it's a real pleasure to welcome David as our first speaker thank you thanks very much Rory so before I dive into talking about aspects of the India-China maritime security relationship I'll just say a few words about this project and our fellow speakers today this conference is the outcome of a two-year project of the Australia India Institute with the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation the project involved a series of seminars with senior policy makers and analysts in India China the United States Singapore Japan and Australia over a period of two years and it's really about what I see as one of the key security challenges faced by the Indo-Pacific region in coming years indeed this challenge is a function of the Indo-Pacific itself and that is the growing interactions between East Asia and the Indian Ocean two regions that have historically operated fairly separately but as we know this is now changing with the near simultaneous rise of China and India as major economic and military powers and increasingly we in Australia are as Rory mentioned are going to have to increasingly pay a lot more attention not just to the impact of the rising rise of China on East Asia or on the China-US relationship but also on the China-India relationship China and India are fast emerging as major maritime powers in the Indo-Pacific and as their interests expand they are increasingly coming into contact in the maritime domain so this project has essentially sought to better understand and articulate Indian and Chinese strategic thinking about each other in the maritime domain and of course the dynamics of this relationship are changing very fast and in fact it's very difficult to keep up with developments but nevertheless there are key underlying elements in their strategic perceptions over the long term so today I'm pleased to say that we've been able to bring together some key thinkers and analysts to discuss these issues later this morning we'll hear from Professor Yoji from the University of Macau who many would regard as one of the leading analysts on the evolution of Chinese naval thinking not only in the Niasis but right across the whole Indo-Pacific and that's really I think a piece that has been missing from a lot of discussion about Chinese naval thinking and in fact his exposition of Chinese thinking about the Indo-Pacific is probably the best articulation on that subject I have seen. After lunch we'll be hearing from Pramit Pau Chaudhuri who is foreign editor of the Hindustan Times one of India's leading newspapers and Pramit exemplifies the sort of foreign affairs journalist that India produces so well and perhaps we in Australia could do with more of but he's certainly a journalist that works close to the heart of Indian thinking on foreign affairs and I'd like to acknowledge his flight from hell yesterday to to join us he spent most of the day sitting in Melbourne airport and I think his bag is still sitting there so he'll be talking about changing perspectives of recent Indian governments about how to engage with China and deal with the challenges that India sees from the rise of China in the Indian Ocean region and I think Pramit will cut through much of the noise that we hear about this and give us a very clear picture of the views from South Block now later this afternoon we'll be hearing from two excellent Indian maritime security specialists on different aspects of Indian naval strategy in the Indian Ocean which have a very important impact both on the India-China relationship but also very importantly for Australia itself First, Abhijit Singh, a former Indian naval officer and now with the Observer Research Foundation will talk about Indian perceptions of recent developments in the South China Sea and how those disputes potentially impact India's interest in the Indian Ocean and this is really a key example of the strategic interconnectedness of those two theatres that we try and encapsulate in this idea of the Indo-Pacific and secondly we have Deshana Barua from Carnegie India to discuss Indian thinking about maritime domain awareness and the need to develop Indian capabilities right across the Indian Ocean and in my view this issue or this area will increasingly become a central part of India-Australia and India-US defence cooperation in the Indian Ocean so it's an important subject that we need to be talking about and thinking about here in Australia a lot more So let me talk now turn to my own presentation which is really intended to provide an ideational backdrop to Sino-Indian maritime security relations in the Indian Ocean and my talk today is subtitled A Contest of Status and Legitimacy which is intended to bring out the key elements of the security relationship in the Indian Ocean region and that is the very very different perceptions of their own and each other's status and legitimacy in the region and I should stress it's not about objective questions of status or legitimacy it's about perceptions of status and legitimacy and these are really major factors driving strategic behaviour So the starting point is that the Sino-Indian security relationship is quite difficult in many respects it's relatively volatile and has a number of unresolved issues between the two countries there's the baggage from the 1962 war which is still really quite deeply felt in India the ongoing border dispute in the Himalayas China's alliance with Pakistan which has included the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles and China's growing relationships elsewhere in South Asia Not least is China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean where it is perceived in Delhi to be shaping the strategic environment in its favour and forming alignments that could ultimately be used against India As I mentioned today I will focus on one aspect of the relationship and that is how fundamental differences in Chinese views on status and legitimacy of their roles in the Indian Ocean could exacerbate an already competitive security dynamic in the maritime domain So first I'll talk about China's strategic imperatives in the Indian Ocean and then talk about India's aspirations towards taking a leading role in the Indian Ocean and its perspectives on China's presence in the region Third, China's perspectives on India and its role in the Indian Ocean And in conclusion in my view Beijing will find it increasingly difficult to create a favourable strategic environment in the Indian Ocean for itself in opposition to India Nevertheless, there is little sign that Beijing is prepared to do what it takes to co-opt India as a partner in the Indian Ocean region So China's primary strategic imperative in the Indian Ocean is the protection of its sea lanes of communication or slocks across the Indian Ocean particularly those that carry the great majority of China's energy imports Now Beijing is keenly aware that its slocks are highly vulnerable to threats from both state and non-state actors especially in the narrow choke points in the Indian Ocean through which trade must pass and those include the Strait of Hummus at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia Now Chinese strategists are concerned that an adversary may use these vulnerabilities as a bargaining chip in the context of a wider dispute Now China also has a number of other developing interests in the region including a growing population of Chinese nationals and big investments And these other issues the non strictly maritime issues if you like are becoming increasingly important in Beijing strategic thinking about the Indian Ocean At the same time China's military expansion program will significantly enhance its ability to project power into the Indian Ocean in the long term Its capabilities already exceed those of India's by a considerable margin China's naval presence has grown in connection with anti piracy deployments in the western Indian Ocean which Beijing has now essentially made permanent including by developing logistical support facilities for its navy in Djibouti China's One Belt One Road initiative will also involve a the development of a swathe of maritime infrastructure right across the northern Indian Ocean and down the east coast of Africa As you might expect India's imperatives and perceptions of its role in the Indian Ocean are quite different India considers itself as the leading Indian Ocean state and as destined to be the natural leader of the region In fact, it takes a somewhat proprietary attitude towards the Indian Ocean and perceives the presence of extra regional naval powers particularly those of China as essentially illegitimate India has long harbored ambitions to become the dominant power of the Indian Ocean in the long term Though few Indian officials would care to publicly admit it many in Delhi see the Indian Ocean as more or less India's Ocean India's views on the Indian Ocean are partly defensive the country's colonial experience is used to justify the exclusion of extra regional powers from the Indian Ocean an approach that some analysts label as India's Munro doctrine which is an idea that is explicitly modelled after the US Munro doctrine where Washington declared supremacy in its hemisphere about a more than a century ago and rejected the presence of other extra regional powers The idea involves an assertion at least unofficially that the military presence of outside powers in India's neighbourhood is essentially illegitimate and that neighbouring countries should ultimately rely on India as the predominant security manager of the region and as the security provider to the region If it's not actually a policy it is more in the nature of a preferred objective It reflects an instinctive view among many in India that if the Indian Ocean is not actually India's in an ideal world it ought to be But these aspirations for dominance or leadership in the Indian Ocean also reflect India's broader strategic aspirations Some Indian strategists draw a direct connection between India's maritime ambitions and its aspirations to become a great world power Just as other rising powers through history have seen naval dominance or naval power as a prerequisite to great power them Now of course the Sino-Indian relationship in the Indian Ocean is part of a much broader relationship that combines elements of cooperation coexistence and competition But the relationship in the Indian Ocean also has its own dynamics China's relations in the Indian Ocean as I mentioned are not generally perceived in Udalli as being a genuine reflection of China's interests in the region Rather many Indian analysts perceive these regional relationships as being directed against India either to encircle it or to keep it off balance China's projection of naval power into the Indian Ocean has become the Indian Navy's principal long-term source of concern And in a way this has only reinforced India's aspirations towards a regional leadership role China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean has also become an important driver in India's relationships with the United States and Australia Udalli sees an imperative to work with Washington and Canberra to balance or delay the growth of China's naval presence in the Indian Ocean However overall India's options are fairly limited It disapproves of China's presence in the Indian Ocean but is still fairly uncertain about how to respond to it In fact, India is many years away from being the predominant power in the region if it ever reaches that status and so it will need to adjust its response to China accordingly Now India's claims to special prerogatives in the Indian Ocean and its views on the illegitimacy of China's presence create fertile conditions for competition Now this dynamic is exacerbated by another factor and a very important factor and that is India's desire to maintain China's strategic vulnerability in the Indian Ocean Despite the claims of some in reality China's presence in the Indian Ocean its naval presence in the Indian Ocean represents a manageable military threat Indeed, the Indian Ocean is the one area in which India holds a clear military advantage over China Unlike other elements of the relationship where India is normally at a disadvantage the geography of the Indian Ocean gives major advantages to India and corresponding disadvantages to China including the need to deploy naval forces through narrow choke points and rely on limited and uncertain logistical support when it arrives In strategic terms the Indian Ocean represents internal lines for India and external lines for China Indeed, it is very difficult to see China ever being in a position to defend the entirety of its slocks across the Indian Ocean and remember it's insufficient just to be able to defend a portion of one's slocks one has to be able to defend the entirety of one's slocks Indeed, it is this naval vulnerability that gives the maritime dimension of the relationship really quite special significance The Indian Navy has a clear strategy of building its capabilities near the Indian Ocean choke points such as the Strait of Malacca to create an implicit threat of interdiction of Chinese slocks Indeed, some analysts are skeptical about the threat of a distant blockade to China and the Indian Ocean but the possibility of that blockade is taken sufficiently seriously by both countries to become an important driver of their strategic thinking about the Indian Ocean Beijing's basic concern is that in the event of a conflict between the two states India might be tempted to escalate from the land dimension where India may suffer setbacks to the maritime sphere where it could employ its substantial advantages to restrict China's Indian Ocean trade In Chinese war planning this is called the 1.5 war scenario where there is a primary war occurring in East Asia potentially involving the United States and Japan and a smaller regional conflict breaks out in the Indian Ocean region involving India So Beijing takes a sharply different view from New Delhi on India's role in the Indian Ocean and the legitimacy of China's regional presence Although Beijing may currently accept US predominance in the Indian Ocean and indeed it can do little about it it takes quite a different view to India's aspirations A starting point of these perceptions are Chinese perceptions of India's status in the international system In contrast with India's views on its own destiny to become a world power Chinese analysts perceive the country as lacking in comprehensive national power and ascribe to it a status that is significantly below other major Asian powers such as Japan and Russia Indeed there is a major asymmetry in Chinese and Indian threat perceptions India tends to regard China as a significant threat whereas China does not regard India in those terms Chinese perceptions may be changing if slowly India's build-up of military capabilities near Southeast Asia is attracting attention of Chinese analysts But it is the US-India relationship that really grabs Beijing's attention particularly the prospects of substantial defence cooperation between them In fact I would argue that the India-US defence relationship is one of the only things that makes Beijing sit up and take notice of India There is also a widespread perception among Chinese analysts that India seeks to establish a sphere of influence or even hegemony in the Indian Ocean and various analyses of the perspectives of Chinese strategic experts show a widespread if not unanimous view that among them that India believes that the Indian Ocean is India's ocean But at the same time Beijing strongly suggests any suggestions that India has any ability to restrict China's relationships in the region And overall China pays little heed to Indian sensitivities about China's activities Indeed few Chinese analysts even appear to have an understanding of the depth of Indian sensitivities about China's presence Some argue that India's neighbours have the perfect right to form economic and security relationships with whichever country they choose China's links to Pakistan which as I mentioned earlier include the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles are brushed off as unimportant because according to Chinese analysts they are not directed at India And Chinese analysts argue that the a policy of supporting Pakistan in order to balance and contain India if it ever existed is no longer a feature of Chinese thinking However none of this is any reassurance to analysts in Delhi In fact China's I would argue that China's lack of sensitivity towards India in its dealings with India's neighbours is a key driver of the negative dynamic that we are seeing in Sino-India relations And a great example of this occurred in September 2014 when just a few days prior to the planned visit of President Xi to India and in fact the first visit by Xi and meeting with Prime Minister Modi in their capacity as leaders of the countries of their own countries A few days before that a Chinese submarine made an unplanned and unannounced visit to Colombo in Sri Lanka and simultaneously in the north a battalion of Chinese PLA troops crossed the line of actual control in the Himalayas Now it's not clear at what levels these actions were approved but any analysts with even a passing knowledge of South Asia should have been aware of India's likely reaction They left New Delhi absolutely furious and had a significant adverse impact on Xi's visit Among other things these actions reduced any room that Modi had to agree to China's proposed investment projects in India So despite waving billions of dollars in potential investments around in India Xi went home empty-handed and really ultimately any possibility of a China-India partnership in the short term where it was left in tatters Now to my mind these events raise real questions about Beijing's strategy towards India What was Beijing trying to achieve through them? Was it attempting to send a message that China could do as it wished in and around South Asia? And to what extent were there differences in an opinion between military and civilian decision makers? Or simply were decision makers did they simply lack an understanding of Indian sensitivities? Now some Chinese analysts have begun to concede that China's lack of transparency over its activities in the Indian Ocean and that includes China's maritime Silk Road initiative could be causing unnecessary damage in the relationship Nidelli claims that Beijing has not adequately responded to requests for clarification about its intentions over the maritime Silk Road and the One Belt One Road project leading the Indian Foreign Secretary to comment that when a national initiative is devised with national interest it is not incumbent on others to buy it Overall in my view there seems to be little chance that India will be a willing partner to China in the Indian Ocean and every chance that India will oppose Chinese initiatives throughout the region We saw this only a few weeks ago when Modi on India's national day sent his greetings to the people of Baluchistan Now this greeting was directed at China just as much at Pakistan knowing that the proposed CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor would be running through the province of Baluchistan And this has all been driven by Beijing's failure to address India's concerns about these projects And in part this has been part of the fuel that has been feeding the fire of the conflict in Kashmir Now greater transparency by Beijing and its relationships in the Indian Ocean might stop India from sliding into simple obstructionism over China's projects and engagement in the region but transparency alone would not address the fundamental differences in perceptions over India's and China's roles in the region This would require a much greater effort on both sides to build a mutual understanding and respect of their competing perspectives In fact, in my view I think there is a considerable risk that these differing perceptions over status and aspirations and legitimacy could descend into long-term strategic rivalry China seems intent on pressing ahead with its plans in the Indian Ocean region without making a major effort to co-opt India as a partner However, China may find it very difficult to create a favourable geostrategic environment for itself in the Indian Ocean in opposition to India Now, all these issues raise major challenges for Australia and every country with interest in the Indo-Pacific There is much focus on China's assertiveness in the Pacific theatre most obviously in the South China Sea but to what extent do these concerns also translate into the Indian Ocean theatre In the Indian Ocean is China merely moving to protect its own legitimate interests and if so should Australia be working with its major partners such as the United States and India to co-opt China as a third stakeholder in the Indian Ocean Alternatively one of the many alternatives should Australia be working with our partners to improve defensive capabilities in the Indian Ocean to perhaps more effectively deter assertive Chinese behaviour elsewhere These are big questions that I'm not going to seek to answer them today but if I could ask Premat Pal Chaudhuri to say spend five or so minutes giving us his thoughts on these questions I'd appreciate it Thank you David mentioned the mono doctrine One of the things when I studied American diplomatic history as a college student in the US one of the things that we're always reminded of though the mono doctrine worked because Britain supported it the original mono doctrine actually written by Lord Castle Ray who send it to John Quincy Adams who basically told James Monroe make it an American announcement and the Britain will automatically support it because the British Navy not the American Navy has the capacity to enforce the mono doctrine but we can pretend it's American and one of the things I'd like to emphasise I think I fully agree with most of what David has mentioned but I'd just like to put a little perspective to this while it's important to yes, the Indo-China relationship is basically adversarial but the Indian side is also fully cognisant that it's partly adversarial because the Chinese don't take India very seriously and this is I've been a part of a Track 2 dialogue with the Chinese now for four years and this is very clear that the Chinese really get irritated and people put India and China on the same plane so this is nonsense this is like putting India and Nigeria on the same plane or something and it's really insulting to them I say Nigeria, I lived in Africa 15 years so I'm quite happy to tell them the land of my childhood give them a little hard time but the point is that Indians accept this you talk to them at the highest level I'm always struck by the fact they'll always say well part of the policy that we have is to eventually try to make China to take, let China take us seriously and that's going to take a while we accept this in the meantime we have to manage the relationship on a whole host of other fronts of which the primary area is the border dispute and the constant should say engagements between India and the Chinese Chinese soldiers if you've ever been to the border up there and talked to our soldiers or talked to or been to some of these areas you realize that the systems are actually very well worked out that for the most part there's a very complex system by which the two sides work out if sometimes the troops cross each other and so on it doesn't actually happen to be a problem and the Indian side monitors some of this largely to see whether or not China is sending a message at some point or another and they do the same thing presumably for us now having said that what else does the Indian system think on the change one of the things and I go back to the monodroctor is that and this is a very important part of it a large portion of what India does with China is also driven by how India perceives a larger geopolitical framework globally and on the Indian Ocean side and I think it's very important to mention this so I want to add this to what David is saying India's ocean strategy and strategy in other parts of the world is also driven by their relationship with the United States and one of the key elements that Indian side has been worried about especially since the Obama administration has come to power is that America is not very interested in the larger parts of the world and a lot of the post World War II consensus that drove American foreign policy and which we have taken for granted at least the Indian side definitely has is now basically falling apart in Washington and it doesn't matter whether Hillary Clinton comes to power the fact that a person like Donald Trump has come so close to being coming to power in Washington is very clear sign for them that at least one half of the political establishment or voting base in America no longer supports that consensus some of you probably written seen in the Rom-Rites recent article I think it was in the Atlantic in foreign policy showing that Trump is effectively a Taftian Republic a Republican going back to a 19th century isolationist scent of what America should be Indians have been looking at this for a long time and for them Obama was really the beginning of that tradition coming back into play whether it was a so-called G2 policy his real deep reluctance to get involved in any way whether in the Middle East even if that meant the rise of the Islamic State but I'll add another thing that not so well known is the Somali pirates at one point the Somali pirates had become such a problem on the western Indian ocean that it was beginning to seriously impact the Indian economy our coal supplies trade was effectively beginning it was actually taking an impact on our GDP figures are then non-national security advisor Shiv Shankarman and actually assembled a core of nations Sri Lanka for example and some of the African states and I think even one Arab state to consider an expeditionary force against the Somali pirates in which Indian soldiers ground troops would have led the way and the Indian Navy would have led the battle the country that opposed it was the United States we don't want to get involved in attacking another Muslim country forget it, that's off the radar even if all America was asked to do was provide air support and airlift capacity support America said nothing doing for the Indian side it was just one more bit of evidence that as far as the Indian ocean was concerned as was true for other parts of the planet the Americans were now so deeply reluctant to get involved or commit themselves in any way and even try to seek accommodation with China that India would effectively had to begin to design an Indian ocean strategy and a larger foreign policy that would have to assume that America would only occasionally be part of the equation so a lot of what we're seeing on the Indian ocean side is not just it fits in should we say with a larger sort of latent Indian aspiration to be a great power in its own area but it fits in also with a deep sense of concern that the country that used to provide the public security goods in the Indian ocean region including the Persian Gulf area in the states of Malacca and southeast Asia simply may or may not be there but we would assume that over time it will be less likely to be there than it is right now and as a consequence the one of the and so the other side flip side to this has been the very savage degradation of the relationship between India and Russia in fact recently I met the foreign secretary Indian foreign secretary and I asked him I said what is your one of your we're beginning to discuss various geopolitical issues and he said the Russia relationship is now possibly one of the most critical problems we will face over the coming decade and basically that Russia had become so subservient to Beijing since the Ukraine crisis that India could really no longer factor this Russia increasingly into its own geopolitical equations this in turn had other consequences for India in various other fields and the other geopolitical concern that India has now is as David I fully agree that one belt one road and the flagship enterprise within that is the China Pakistan economic corridor the combination of the one built one road and you can see this in repeated public speeches on the Indian side now is that connectivity and infrastructure are now becoming geopolitical concerns for Asia and definitely for India and the one built one road now the flip side to this of course is that having decided that China having decided that it's going to put a lot of its it's going to really be Xi Jinping's almost personal prestige project to build the Pakistan economic corridor now anybody who knows those parts of the world like Baluchistan or Kashmir and the areas of the one built one road will eventually go into areas that are actually controlled by think by the Taliban it's going to be interesting to see how the Chinese build this because the Pakistanis have not been able to build anything there and that's the decided best efforts of the Pakistani military you talk to the Iranians there was an attempt by one Indian oil and gas minister who was a big supporter of a pipeline through Pakistan to visit that same area of Baluchistan he went all the way up to the district area and then the Pakistani army turned them back saying we can't actually guarantee any more so the Indian side now has flipped us around to the Chinese and basically begun to say well we have a various problems with you so if you want this corridor to be built and you want our endorsement which has now become almost a constant pattern at the highest level when Xi and Modi meet when are you going to endorse the road and the Belt Road and Modi is very clear I'm not going to endorse the Belt Road unless we have some other issues to be worked out first we're now using that as leverage with China and it's been remarkably successful at least as far as the Pakistan side is concerned so what I just want to put all of this together what I'm trying to say is simply this is that while there's definitely a whole host of areas as David has gone into the military side the border issues, the maritime the diplomacy, the struggles for influence with smaller countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal and in Africa increasingly between India and China though often it's important to realize that the US, Japan are our players in all of this as well at the heart of this is a larger geopolitical Indian concern that has really picked up only in the past 10 years and at the heart of it is that America is no longer a dependable player that Russia is probably no longer going to be not be expected to be on our side over the next decade and that it is also as I mentioned not completely clear what China wants to accomplish in the Indian Ocean because in China itself is not only just not transparent, I would argue China itself in many times hasn't worked out exactly what it wants to do which makes in many ways much more imperative I think that countries like India, Australia Indonesia and so on in this region the mid-level powers if you wish talk a lot more with each other both of what they believe the two or three bigger players are actually planning and I'll just finally end one country where is an area that while as David has mentioned that the US-India relationship is something that China does pay attention to the other relationship China pays to now increasingly is the India-Japanese one Japan Japan is not a military power in the Indian Ocean in any sense of the world but what Japan has come in and said strategically we don't do military very well we can't even sell submarines to Australia but we have but we do have other capacities which is that you don't have a world-class manufacturing sector in your economy and at the heart of everything is your economy so we're going to build you one the Japanese first offered to transfer thousands of their factories out of China because they want to get out of China and move them to India said fine move them but then India never built the infrastructure to accommodate them so the Japanese said alright we get how this works we'll build the infrastructure for you so in effect if you look at projects like the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor the western dedicated freight corridor corridor these are projects on an enormous scale and this is India so it'll take a while for them to come up but they are coming up and just the DMIC the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor when you realize what China Japan is trying to do they're building a 1400 long kilometer long state-of-the-art logistics corridor that is designed to replicate the Osaka Nagoya industrial corridor that runs through the inland sea and is a heart of Japan's industrial capacity replicate that in India shift as much as 8,000 to 10,000 of its factories out of China put them all along them and have them become the core of a giant industrial export-oriented manufacturing base that India just simply lacks and at the top end of the technology cycle and they want to build four of these corridors this is just the first one and they've already started planning for the second and the third all across the board the Japanese are basically saying by the time we're finished when I go to Japan the government is very clear the productivity base the surges in your service-based economy are now slowly dying out you lack capacities at the high end digital manufacturing which are the core of aerospace defense capacities you're starting to see that in some sectors of your economy but you do have one thing you have one software capability far better than almost any other Asian country so we just have to merge these to create a genuine economic base from which your military and strategic capacities can then surge and as David has mentioned the other country that's come into the picture is the United States and said we're part of the same game and what we want to do with you is that the technologies Japan gives you those technologies the IPR stuff that we have that doors start to open for you to pick up whatever you want out of the American basket and I last met the US Ambassador and I concluded this he said I asked him I said in the US relationship defense relationship where are you seeing the greatest progress he said it's very clear the joint working group and carrier technology because carriers effectively combine almost every element of the best of what America has whether it's aerospace, submarine reconnaissance, satellite it's all packaged into one giant carrier task force and he said your next generation carrier your present generation are basically a lost cause for us your next one is a ski jump it's not really in our technology sphere but the generation after that that's going to be American and it's going to be the best of what we can because of China and what we can do to help you respond to that and try to build it first and that's where the Japanese come in I'll just end with that Thank you I think for those wide ranging remarks responding I think to the way that David Brewster has I think very well framed our discussion today it's good to see I think from the outset that there's going to be quite a sophisticated discussion on these issues moving beyond firstly I think a very simplistic US-China dynamic the only dynamic that matters in the Indo-Pacific secondly identifying that there are overlapping areas of competition and coexistence and the question is really how do we manage this how do we navigate our way through it while maintaining the interests of the countries in between maintaining stability and mutual respect I also think it's important to look at this beyond that again very simplistic containment lens that we often apply to strategies to manage the rise of China in the region it's quite clear that there are obviously deep trading interests and other forms of engagement between India and China but it's also quite clear that China's interests in the Indian Ocean of course in many cases there are legitimate interests and China will be a player in the Indian Ocean regardless of what other countries do about it so I think the policy challenge that I would perhaps put to both of you and maybe to the group as we go through the day is what are the options for a country like Australia in helping to create the context for a Chinese role in the Indian Ocean that is stable that is not destabilising and that doesn't raise risks of conflict with India or others so I think the areas of common ground that have been identified in for example building webs of partnership with India, Australia and other countries in the region I think is particularly fruitful I also like the characterisation that I think David you pointed to and both of you pointed to about the so called One Belt One Road initiative that China has in the region I've had Indian accounts of that put to me that perhaps there should be many belts and many roads but it's interesting that if we look at this Indo-Pacific idea of I guess the energy and other linkages between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans now being I guess a pretty inevitable aspect of the way we engage with the region whatever China says regarding the Indo-Pacific idea clearly the maritime Silk Road the maritime dimension of China's engagement across the Indian Ocean with infrastructure and partnerships and I think ultimately a security dimension is perhaps the Indo-Pacific with Chinese characteristics one thing that neither of you mentioned perhaps in a lot of detail yet but we might come to a bit later in the day is how much will the Indian Ocean matter in the wider strategic competition between India and China and by that I mean not only the point about vulnerability of China's energy lines across the Indian Ocean but also for example the role that submarines and other naval forces are going to play in the wider strategic balance the fact that India for example is appearing to invest a bit more seriously now in its nuclear armed submarines it's SSBN program which may or may not provide it with some degree of deterrence against China the fact that China also is now investing much more heavily in submarines and we're beginning to see Chinese submarines in the Indian Ocean too so I would be interested perhaps if either of you came back to that but look with those comments and just also noting that it's great to see you here because I think having known you and worked with you for I think 15 years or so now certainly one of the voices that really helped me understand India during my diplomatic career it's great for you to be introduced to colleagues again here in Canberra and we'll hear from you more this afternoon but with that I might open to a few questions or comments from around the room for our speakers please raise your hand if you have a comment or question please and perhaps identify yourself if you can Good morning, my name is I'm in the Australian Navy I have a question for you Dave you spoke there a lot about China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean we're also seeing the Indian Navy increasingly having in the South China Sea and getting some relationships with Asia giving you comments about how the Chinese don't necessarily take India seriously give any comments on how the Chinese view India's naval activity in the South China Sea and their relationship with the Asian nations I'll start look I see India's naval activities in the South China Sea is essentially reactive against China rather than reflecting real Indian interests other than there is certainly a broader interest in freedom of navigation but in terms of economic interest in that area they're actually fairly minor and certainly many people see India's activities in the South China Sea as simply an attempt to play a balancing game against China that India can play with Vietnam just as China can play with Pakistan but frankly I don't think the Chinese take it seriously at all Prometh would you have a different view? I would take more or less agree I think the bulk of what India has done in the South beyond the Straits of Malacca has really been at the invitation of Asian countries not because India itself is widely excited by the South China Sea whenever you talk at the ice level they say that the Indian Ocean is quite big enough and we still know we're close to coming close to being able to stabilize this area so we have the odd naval exercise there and so on but it's noticeable that Ashton Carter, Pentagon Chief has been a great enthusiast of the Indo-U.S. relationship and has visited, made our Defense Minister eight times and is now trying to sneak in one more visit before his administration leaves but when he kept asking India why don't you join the Americans and patrols in the South China Sea, the Indian responses you can't get Australia, Japan or your other treaty allies to join you why are you even wasting your time asking us we're not even a Pacific Littoral State so if you can't get them to join they'll come to ask us for anything and even if you do frankly we're still not interested it's just seen as really beyond the limits of any Indian territory capacity to be at best yes, occasionally we may want to irritate the Chinese but we actually find it's much better to irritate them in the Sea of Japan and so we've been holding more naval exercises largely with Japan and the U.S. the trilateral the Malabar exercises for example Japan is now permanently part of that and we've now extended them into often the last round is actually just off the coast of Okinawa we find that much more better if you really want to irritate the Chinese that's a much better place to go so you're not denying that India has an interest in playing a strategic role in the Pacific it's just that it picks its fights carefully it's really priority number 10 or 11 on this it's sort of like saying does India have a strategic interest in the Atlantic Ocean yes, but really very low on the horizon I think the bigger concern when that will see a new shift that's developed in the past year is actually West Asia the Persian Gulf we're seeing a lot of concern there as the American fifth fleet is now shrinking very rapidly and America's willingness to do anything in the Persian Gulf is now quite negligible where despite the first two years of one and a half years of the present government in India Modi had did nothing did never visited the Middle East and he's very rapidly he's met you've gone to the UAE, Qatar Iran, Saudi Arabia and the next Republic Day Chief guest in India will be the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi the first time you've ever had anybody from the UAE in the past 60 years thank you for your presentation my name is Vibhor I'm a master's student at ANU my question is if you look at the Chinese narrative about India's objection of their presence in the Indian Ocean they would give you a counter saying that India never objected to US presence in Diago Garcia in the Indian Ocean so why are they objecting now to our presence so would you say from your presentation Dr. David can I infer that the strengthening of India-US defence relationship after 2007 and the fact that it actually has a naval presence in the Indian Ocean that has accelerated the Chinese assertiveness in the Indian Ocean before you answer because we've got a few other comments I might take a few more and then we'll give you a few to respond to at the end so I think the gentleman here and then Lee Corder and I'll come to you at the end great please Tom Worthington from the Research School of Computer Science earlier in the year I found myself teaching the students about the ethics in the South China Sea so I'd like to ask about the role you see technology playing in the region if China can mass produce robot submarines and aeroplanes at the rate they produce smartphones and if India can use their clever software developers to program those sorts of devices and produce them in their new high-tech corridor will that make American aircraft carriers and submarines patrolling the region a bit like battleships were in World War II We'll take one more and then we'll answer those and then do one last round so I think Lee Corder and Tom it's great to see you into cross-disciplinary favour to the proceedings today, thanks for being here Thank you, good morning I just want to try and draw a connection by two comments that were made by our opening speakers David talked about the context of status and legitimacy and all this the business of perception and I guess behind that is the so what for Australia question and then Premier talked about the need for much greater middle power engagement with India in the region and it just seems that here in Australia we're taking China very seriously but I don't think we're taking India very seriously I just wonder if you would care to comment on that and the so what of that and if that my perception is one that David shares from the Australian side and if Premier shares that perception from the India side and the so what for this wider geostrategic situation that we're considering here Thank you, Lee and I think actually Craig we will take yours as the final question of the moment for this session I have to wrap up in about six minutes so we'll take yours as well and then answer them all together Thank you for two terrific presentations I'm intrigued by the way that both of you slip between talking about Modi and talking about India and I wondered if you could elaborate a little bit on the extent to which you think the government regime in India under Modi is an agent independent of the various other agents that one might regard as shaping foreign policy over time corporate organisations, public bodies civil society, the military itself to what extent are you talking about a regime or to what extent are you thinking at a sort of larger temporal horizon about trying to identify an emergent Indian policy Thanks and there's four fantastic questions there and to the extent we can't answer them in the next few minutes I think we'll come back to those throughout the day US India technology the obsolescence or otherwise of aircraft carriers is Australia going to take India seriously although with the turnout here today I suspect that we're beginning to see a bit of a change on that one and finally is Modi India what are the other players in India on these issues so please David we'll go to you first and then to promise I'll start with the US, look you can choose to pose the US presence in the Indian Ocean for some three decades absolutely vociferously including Diego Gasly they do not do it now because they see China as the greater threat and assume that the Americans will fade away over decades and that it is in India's interest to allow that slow fade to happen slowly into operation with India India stopped opposing the fade away of the British in the 1950s and 1960s because they realised it was actually in India's interest so I think there's a fairly close parallel I don't know much about robots but I can say that the big technological I would say the big technological issue is to the extent to which the Chinese can develop anti-access area denial capabilities in large swathes of the Indian Ocean that would really be the big challenge for India although I don't see it happening for quite some time I think that's so far away from China's capabilities so what for Australia I would say it's a big so what because and I think Lee and I are in a loud agreement Australia really doesn't have an Indian Ocean strategy we're watching we need a strategy and we just don't have one and that strategy has to involve where we see India what role do we see for India in 20 years time and what role we're seeing for China in 20 years time in the Indian Ocean and we haven't really worked all those things through Modi I agree we it's too easy just to say India or Delhi and Modi etc I mean I think the focus of Modi is because he is the most dynamic factor in Indian foreign policy that we have seen for a lifetime and his dynamism overrides the many other multiple strands of Indian thinking about foreign policy so it's a short hand perhaps lazy way to address the issue to focus on him Pramod I agree India's overall strategy or desires always being there will be no great powers in the Indian Ocean other than India but they also accept that that's an ideal and they get public goods from the Americans in fact now they're irritated or unhappy that the Americans are pulling the Indian Ocean a little faster than they want them to the other countries should add that there's France another that's the only European power that keeps an Indian Ocean also till I guess and we do work closely with the French we also want them to leave at some point because we don't think they bring anything more except I guess now we all have French submarines right so any different maintenance second on robots well it's interesting warfare now it's one of the other there are three countries India buys weapons from the United States now we're now the fourth largest buyer of American weapons in the world Russia our traditional Russian supplier but slowly slowly starting to go off the off the list number three is Israel and on any year any given year one of these three will be number one now the Israel relationship is very very different on the military side and Israel comes in and says why are you buying aircraft by drones why are you buying this worry about cybersecurity they are completely different security paradigm Israelis come in at a very high tech level and we are their number one customer in the world for weapons 50% of their entire defense exports goes to India now and we work very closely with them on a whole host of fronts we have the Israeli made drone fleet larger than Israel's in fact the Israeli aircraft corporation lives off of our stuff and having recently joined the missile technology control regime and I think we will formally become a member in December we will now be able to buy armed drones on a degree of weapons systems that we've never been able to do before so we I think within the Indian system there's already an acceptance that we're going to have to slowly shift in that direction but the partner so far has been Israel in almost any other country what was the other question Australia take India seriously and finally is Modi India well I have to admit you know before I came here I went through my notebook to see all of the briefings I'd received from foreign secretaries additional secretaries in the foreign ministry the national security advisor I can go on and on Prime Minister the word Australia didn't appear in one of them two and a half years of three years almost of briefings and I couldn't find a one single reference to the word Australia and when I went back a little further it got even worse because I noticed that the Americans in their briefings to us didn't mention Australia either and in fact there was one reference I noticed one back row briefing where Kurt Campbell at that point was what assistance I could for for East Asia and he actually was saying these are the countries you need to be working with friends of America blah blah blah Japan and so forth and didn't mention Australia and somebody actually asked but you haven't mentioned Australia and he thought about it and he said don't worry about them well part of that is because the assumption Australia is not a problem but part of that also is an assumption that if we have Washington on the Indian side we don't have to worry too much about Canberra and the countries that you're very interested in like Indonesia for example India has almost no relationship with really parlous defence relationship with Indonesia so there is a problem there and then finally as David mentioned we can't seem to find any real Indian Ocean strategy in Canberra so we've kind of given up on finding one Modi I'll give you an anecdote my sense is that the real difference I was on the national security advisory board of the Indian prime minister for four years three of those are with Manmun Singh and one of them is Modi it's a fixed term it's a pro bono position and it's purely advisory and I'm sure the government pays absolutely no attention to us but what was striking for me it's under the official secret act so I can't go into detail but there was an anecdote that I will say we worked on a national security document for the Manmun Singh government and then he fell from power and when Modi came in we told then the new national security advisory said we have this document but the terms of reference were set by the previous government so you may not want to bother with this anymore he said it doesn't matter go ahead and make a presentation to the prime minister anyway so we did we spoke to Modi we gave him a 90 minute presentation and the then convener of the board Mr. Saar Shamsar and our former foreign secretary said exactly this to the prime minister the terms of reference have been set by your predecessor so you may not agree with some of what we are talking about and Modi's response to us basically I have read the notes all the notes that my predecessor left on national security I don't have any problems with any of them my only problem with him is that he didn't implement most of them and that is the core difference between Modi and I would say most Indian governments in recent history is that Modi is very focused on implementation that I am about getting things done the ideas are all there we have mountains of white papers and commission reports and advisers I guess all governments are lying there so we all know what the problems are my job is to get things done and I don't have to I said in Hindi it's a Hindi phrase but it means basically I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time it's just pointless and that's the real shift I think and the second big difference Modi has from previous prime ministers with a longer Indian diplomatic tradition he gets irritated as to why we don't say what we actually believe and he's actually had pulled up diplomats who said this is what we want to happen but this is the official line we've had because since the 1960s this has been the way India talks about it and Modi says if that's actually what we want to do then why didn't we just say it and they'll say well that's not we're always being cautious about the economy don't give me nonsense go off and say it and so he's now much blunter in saying what he thinks India should do and pulling up the Indian and he's been shaking up the Indian system come out and say you're not happy with this country's policies he's the first Indian prime minister to not go to the non-aligned movement why because he actually thinks it's a waste of time we've known this within the system for the past 20 years it's a waste of time but in the Indian prime minister now he's saying yes it is a waste of time so that's the shift I see really with him is that he's now expressing things that we've always believed and as I said he's very problem he's driven as a problem solver Americans like him so much he's really about just getting it let's get it done Obama met him at the East Asia summit in Myanmar and he turned to Modi in front of the other EAS leaders and he said there's the only guy among us who could actually get things done and Modi's response was well I haven't got a Republic Day guest this was November and the Republic Day was two months away in January for India yet and turned to Obama and said why don't you come and Obama looked at him and said okay I like this guy that was a quick decision let's go and both my Indian and American friends were diplomats with a blood drain as my American friend said Christmas and New Year's I'm going to cut you off there because you will have some more strategic stories for us this afternoon I suspect but I think you've had a full taste of what to expect I want to thank you all for your attention for this first session and I want to ask you to join me in thanking our two presenters for their very insightful framing and provocative remarks thank you


My name is Katie Lynch and I'm an associate professor of English at Rockland Community College where I also chair the honors program and Rockland is a two-year college in the State University of New York system. Right now I think in higher education we are still grappling with a model that is very top-down where students are learning from their professors and that's how they're expected to learn and that's how they expect to learn but I think students have so much to teach each other and also to teach their faculty and so the more that we can distribute that learning across different you know sets of texts and in different ways so that students are learning from each other the more we really see different perspectives and different voices which is so important to not be living in this bubble where or echo chamber where the same ideas are repeated over and over and the same ways of thinking are repeated and so the opportunity to do this kind of very big project seems like a way to just diversify the kinds of learning that we do and the kinds of people that we learn from. One of the aspects of equity that I'm most interested in is this idea of pedagogical partnerships where the teacher is not just teaching the students but is rather partnering with the students to ensure that learning happens for everyone and to engage the students as co-creators in the classroom and social annotation in particular has the ability to do that because students can for example annotate a syllabus with an instructor and even lead to making changes with that instructor or they can take ownership of part of a course and read texts together and learn from each other and and then teach that text to their peers in meaningful ways whether that's happening asynchronously or in a synchronous way and that to me promotes a great deal of of equity because you're you're not again privileging that top-down way of learning but instead you're allowing students to own the course themselves and own the content and put their own stamp on it. I think my first piece of advice would be just to start small for example you could start by using the tool hypothesis and using it yourself seeing how you enjoy it use it to annotate anything on the web which is really exciting and then you can bring it in for your students and have them experiment with it it's a it's not a very high stakes kind of you know way to start it's just to just to try it out and and I think the benefits will become apparent very quickly and then as you understand the benefits of that social way of learning I think there'll be a need or a desire to make that more broad and to and to really push it to the possible boundaries.


T F N N headline news update Good morning everybody. I'm Tommy O'Brien comedy alive from T F and N headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida It's Wednesday 10 a.m. Eastern Time 30 minutes into the trading day. We got markets starting off to the downside S&P's right now negative by nine points trading at 2987 got the Dow Jones negative by 57 trading 26,965 Nasdaq negative by 35 points trading at 81 13 goal contract catching a bit up $6 at 1489 60 we'll jump over to retail sales out at 8 30 a.m. This morning that number disappointing actually pulling back negative 0.3% for the month of September the estimate coming into that number was actually for an increase of about 0.3% So that hitting the markets a bit goal getting quite a pop of pairing some of that gain a bit And we're gonna start things off with the chart of the 10-year yield Bonds a little bit of higher price and lower yield you get the 10 year up five ticks at 129 29 You get the 30 year up four ticks at 162 and there is your chart of the 10 year Yesterday's action spiking up to almost 1.78. We pull back to 1.72 10 years sitting at a 1.75 Eight yield as we speak we'll jump back over the charts. We'll start things off with the S&P Reached a high early this morning just before retail sales of 29 96 we've pulled back a bit currently trading 29 88 There's your Dow 30 briefly above 27,000 by two points and then we've pulled back a bit 26,927 right now looking at the December futures contract Nasdaq 100 was up above 79 50 just before retail sales currently trading 79 21 There's your gold contract quite a pop on that number 830 we're trained at 1480. You climb all the way up to 1495 gold now trading at 1489 crude oil above $53 trading at $53 and seven pennies and the euro US dollar train at 110 53 So I referenced it and we'll get the headline for you retail sales unexpectedly decline in signed consumer economy could be cracking retail sales dropping point three percent in September the estimate as I said was for an increase of 0.2 percent and Wrapping it up Bank of America with their earnings this morning opening to the positive side up 3.14 percent and keep your eye on Netflix as they have their earnings tonight after the Bell Netflix down about 43 pennies right now Stay tuned folks come back 10 o'clock with Tom live programming all day at TFNM. We'll be right back


So hello everyone, Akira from Japan, I'm presenting about something about Rails, I mean this talk is about Rails performance, but I'm not going to talk about general application programming technique like eliminating Mplus1 or using Rails cache or things like that. Instead I'm going to focus on how we can find real problems inside the framework and how we can approach them, right? So the title says Rails applications, but the main focus is not really on our application code, but more on Rails itself. So today I brought some actual hacks that as Rails plugins, so I can share them with you and maybe you can check all later, right? So I have a question, is your application fast enough to think so? My answer is no, for me, almost always no. So it's like this, when you start the project it runs fast enough, but as the application grows at some point it becomes really slow. I guess this applies to everyone of you here, right? So is that essentially because Ruby is slow? I think no, Ruby is actually already doing very well. I'm sorry, I should have made the slides more down, sorry. So the real problem lies in the framework architecture, I think, and some very slow components of Rails. So here's the diagram showing actual applications performance, not actually from my actual Rails application, but I'm sorry, download this image from Skylates website without asking them. So I'll delete this if they don't like it. Anyway, this diagram shows that it executes the first query and the second query and the next query in serial order. This means these are actually serially executed in the main thread. For example, while querying to the DB database, Ruby is just waiting. In other words, these are all blocking operations through the main thread. So what if we can perform them without blocking the main thread, like in parallel work, like in a non-blocking manner? So here is the menu of today's presentation, I have five topics. So to begin with, let's start my presentation with this simplest one. API calls. So what I mean by API calls here is usually done by HTTP. Could be invoking some outside API or like microservices. So when you introduce microservices to your application, it would usually add some extra network overhead and make your application actually rather slower. So there's this real problem. Calling external API makes your application slow because it costs like HTTP network cost. So this happens because the API call blocks the main thread while requesting to another HTTP server. And the CPU does nothing while waiting for the response. So how can we make this non-blocking instead? A broad some example. This example is a very simple example that the client makes three requests to a very heavy API. Like it takes one second. The API looks like this. Just sleeps one second. And here's the client code. Just calls the API three times. So simple. So here's the result. It takes three minutes, I mean three seconds. So with this, I could kind of emulate the slow API problem. So how can we fix this problem? It's a very simple Ruby code. Just wrap the API call with the thread new block like this. And now it finishes in one second. So this is something called future pattern kind of. If you use a very new thread, it immediately starts running in background. Then if you call dot value on the thread object, it waits the thread to finish. Then returns the value back to the main thread. And you can do anything else in the main thread while the API is executing in background. Usually we don't use the raw thread object, but use something like this, another object around the thread. So anyway, it's called future pattern. With this basic idea in mind, let's proceed to the next topic. This is a very simple example to push an IO blocking task to a child thread and do something else in the main thread. So the next topic is boosting the database queries. Database queries are so time consuming, which is obvious. And it's essentially just another kind of IO blocking task. While querying to the database, the main thread is just sleeping. So this is how ActiveRocket handles database connections. Basically, ActiveRocket checks out a connection from the pool per each thread, including main thread. One request uses only one connection, but actually the connection pool has many more pooled connections. So we can probably use these extra connections for all the threads other than the main thread. So here's this problem. Database query blocks the main thread, and when you throw query to the database, you need to wait. And we already have a good solution for this problem. Maybe we can apply the future pattern to this problem as well again. Now let me show you an example. Consider we have a very heavy query again like this. It's a very simple example. Well, when it selects a user, it sleeps just the same seconds as the user ID. So it's a silly example, but you know, the idea. So actually it takes three seconds to select user one and user two like this. And using thread, we can do this in two seconds. This is great. So why doesn't ActiveRocket act like this by default? Because there was some problems with this approach. As I told you before, each thread automatically establishes a new connection, grabs a new connection from the connection pool. So if you establish too many new connections, the database pool will dry up very easily. So this is the problem. So we have ActiveRocket actually has the withConnection API to use like this.  So it automatically checks out the connection when thread is joining. So when we show the connection pool stat at the last line, it says that we have five connections in the connection pool and we used three connections for this operation. So I actually implemented something that does this for ActiveRocket as an experimental plugin with these two APIs. First is ActiveRocket relation.future. The highlighting is broken. Like current user.post.future. If you call .future method, then it starts querying in the background. Then if you call .value, sorry, .records, then it returns the asynchronous query results. So it's already on GitHub. So the repository is here. It's named as future records. So you can check it out. It kind of works, but I don't think it's totally production ready. So please be very, very, very careful if you actually try it. Maybe we need to add some thread pool instead of calling thread.new every time. I'm going to explain about what is thread pool later. By the way, there could be several other approaches for this slow query problem. First is share only one connection that is used from Winthread but pass the connection to other child threads or use asynchronous connection API. The first idea is sharing the main connection and pass the connection to the child thread and do something else in the main thread while the child thread is querying. Maybe we can use fiber for this, but I tried it but it was so difficult so I couldn't finish. Or another idea is for some database authors like MySQL 2 or Postgres, they have asynchronous query API. It goes like this. If you query through the asynchronous mode, it immediately returns nil and runs the query in background and it returns the result. If the query is finished, you can get the result by a simple result method. So in order to use this in your application, you need to create a mechanism to detect the query exactly when the query is ended. I could kind of make this work locally, but it requires super crazy hack on ActiveRecord. I needed to use Event Machine, which is so complex. I don't really recommend you try this, but if you want to try, there's an existing project called EM Synchrony. So check it out. So anyway, we're moving on to views as the next topic. Next topic is action view. We often have very slow partial templates because render partial, of course, is again blocking the main thread. In the most cases, partial does not share anything with other threads, I mean other partials, so maybe we can render this synchronously. Maybe with agents. So I did this. Here's my implementation. Add remote true option to render partial. Then it throws the AJAX request, and it kind of renders back AJAX or BJAX or something. Actually, I did this five years ago, and I realized this is a bad approach. I created this, but I do not use this in production anymore. So instead, let's think about simply threading again, future pattern again. So here's the initial implementation of doing action view render partial in the background. If you pass async option to the render method, it runs something, it wraps the render partial method with future object, I mean future pattern object. So this is how it works. So let's try this. By simply adding sleep one to each partial, then let's see how it goes like this. You see we have an action, A action, and A action renders B partial from A.HMRB, and each A view and B partial sleeps one second. And the result is, sorry I forgot to paste the result, but it kind of finishes in one second, and it returns the correct HMR, so it's done. I'm sorry, not done. I'm sorry, it took two seconds actually. So we've got no performance gain. I used thread, so why didn't this become faster? So let's see what's actually happening inside the framework. Well, action view compiles each template and partial templates to a Ruby method to put some debugging code in action view. It outputs something like this in a console, and there in the middle it calls render B, and it passes the result of render B to outputBuffer.Append. And outputBuffer.Append is implemented like this. So what I did was I created a future object by renderAsync, then immediately appends the future object to the buffer, and the buffer does this. It calls .2s to the given option. So outputBuffer.Append, renderPausal, it creates a future object, then immediately calls 2s to the partial object. So then it causes the background thread to join. Why does action view calls 2s inside the buffer? Because outputBuffer is a string, and you need to make sure that anything added to the string is a string, or it would cause some kind of unexpected behavior. You cannot append a symbol, or if you append an integer, it's going to be translated as a code point. So you need to call 2s before appending anything to the string. So how can you make the future object live longer in the buffer, not calling 2s immediately? What if we store the view fragments in an array instead of string, then concatenate all of the fragments when returning HTML response body? The idea is like that. And here's the implementation. It's called ArrayBuffer. I overrided the concatenate method and stored the given fragment in its array. Then if 2s is called, you just kind of join them all. So let's take a benchmark again. Now I did this, actually, and now it returns the result in one second. But please know that real-world templates usually do some more CPU-bound operation than just sleeping one second. So this is just a demonstration. By the way, if you're looking for the fastest template engine in the world that is built on string-based string buffer, there's an implementation called StringTemplate. I'm sure it's the fastest. You can find it here on my GitHub page. It compiles the whole template in one very long string literal with string interpolations. So it creates only one string instance per one template. So it runs very fast, at least on some microbenchmarks. So anyway, now let's see how the array-based version of buffer scales. Here's what is created by a generated scaffold. First, it extracts this repetition part from the index.html to another template on impartial like this. And I put something, again, to sleep randomly in the partial. And I've registered 10 users to this scaffold and requested by a browser. And the result goes like this. Or sometimes it returns some weird error like this. A thread, thread something error. So what the hell is happening here? Of course, you know, it's called race-condition. So why does this partial causes race-condition? Can you find the answer? Because it shares something within threads. It shares an instance variable at sign-output buffer between threads, right? So it causes race-condition. So we need to change the buffer object to be a local variable or thread, local variable or something. So we need to monkey-patch action view. So we need to monkey-patch the template handler first. I'm not going to paste the whole patch, but I've done this. I had to do so many of this, but I did this, actually. So this is how we fix, kind of fix the Ruby template handler. And let's do it again. Let's try rendering it again. Actually, with this fix, the former example perfectly works. It outputs the partials in correct order. So now let's render something else. The next example is new.html.rb rendering form partial from inside. Now let's try to render this with async option. So now it renders a broken HTML like this. So why this happens? This happens because of action views capture helper, which uses, which calls something called capture inside, and which uses the buffer, which actually creates a new buffer and throws it away somehow. And so you can get only the content inside the form for block without adding anything to the main block. So I'm sorry. So I fixed this somehow. I kind of made a horrible hack on action view. And I kind of emulated this only with local variables. So with this batch, we can run as many threads as possible at once. But if you run hundreds or thousands of threads, actually the response time goes bad because threads is costy, and switching between threads takes some time for review. So in order to make it faster, we need to control the number of running threads or the number of established threads. In order to do this, we'll introduce something called thread pool. So of course we could create our own thread pool implementation, but actually Rails ships already ships with this implementation inside concurrent Ruby gem. So we just can use this. So with this thread pool, I finally kind of finished implementing an async partial renderer. But we still have to monkey patch all these other template engines like Slame, Ruby, Hamel, et cetera, et cetera.  I mean, I probably shouldn't say this, but as a main maintainer of Hamel, it's a template engine, but Hamel code base is just horrible. So I couldn't finish monkey patching Hamel until today. So I'm sorry, this gem is not actually finished. So anyway, the code is placed here again on my GitHub page. So we can check out. Oh, and I talked about all these template engines rendering HTML files, but what about JSON renderers? We have this default JSON renderer called Jbuilder, but unfortunately it's completely not working because it's another horrible template engine. But I suppose you're not using Jbuilder anymore because we have a better alternative to Jbuilder called Jb. Jb, of course, works perfectly with my asynchronous renderer, I mean, Array Buffer, because it's implemented in very good manner. So check out the Jbuilder template engine. I mean, Jb, you can find Jb here. So anyway, let's start moving on to the next topic, lazy attributes. So let's move on to the view code inside the view code and find what's slow there. I'm creating another example, another realistic example like this. Scaffolding 100 columns, and I created 1,000 records per 100 columns. So obviously very much real world-ish, right? So we can run this by like this curl and I run this five times and we get results like this. It takes around 1.6 or 1.7 seconds per each request and you see mostly in views, right? So let's see what's happening in views. So what if we change the attribute accessors to literals, to string literals like this? Just like quoting. So the result goes like this. The score improves to be about 800 milliseconds. This means half of the response time was spent on just reading from already selected active record instance, right? So it should be as just a method called. Why does it cost that much? So I counted the number of method calls when calling the attribute accessor. Then it turned out that only one method called actually calls 13 methods inside one attribute access. And if I call a date time, time stand attribute, it makes 30 method calls inside the framework. So looping 1,000 records and accessing 100 columns, it kind of makes this much method calls? Yes, it does. So this is why active records is slow, right? Because it's because the framework is written to be slow.  You're going to use page narration with something like this. But anyway, there are actually, there are some use cases in real world applications like APIs or like FinTech application or something like that. Actually, in fact, we hit this real problem in our application called money forward. We had to render this much models, and it took like 10 seconds, really. So, in my opinion, active record model is designed to do too much work. It's too rich object. Actually, it implements two different roles in one model class. One is dated transfer object, and one is to be a form object, right? The first former is, can be read only, and the latter has to be a read and write object. So you need to do validations and typecasting and et cetera, et cetera. So, and what we need in this scenario just reading is, what we need is more like lightweight read only object, like dated transfer object in like something like entity being in Java or something, right? So, you can create something like that simply with Ruby struct or something, but probably you don't want to do that because it's not going to play nice with decorators. I mean, with this plug-in. So, instead, why don't we just store the attributes as a hash instance inside the model object, like active record used to be like that. So, let's try this. To solve this real problem, not by adding more complexity, but retrieving back the simplicity of active record two or three. Again, we need to monkey patch active record because recent version of active record implements the attribute API. It's a very good feature indeed, but it's so heavy actually. To be fair, we actually use this feature in Money Forward for some columns, but I think it's very rare case, I think. So, inside the attribute API, it creates each column object per each active record model instance. That is why it's so heavy. So, why don't we opt out this attribute API feature? Like, not to create column objects by default, but only for these users who actually use this attribute feature. So, here's my implementation. If the model declares no custom attribute declaration, it returns active record three object. So, here's the implementation. First, I made a simple attribute set object that delegates to a hash object, then attribute set builder object that builds that lightweight attribute set object, then override attributes builder to return the lightweight attribute builder object if the model has no custom attribute. And here's the result. Again, it used to take 1.6, 1.7 seconds for each request, and now the result improves like this. It improves like 40% faster. So, I'm sorry, it's still not projection ready. I need to implement some typecasting when reading, but I'm sure it would still be faster than the default active record object. I'm going to skip this. Again, I have one more thing to cover, the named URL. Now, now the model is fast enough, then what's slow next? The answer is links, these links. If we just delete these links, the result goes from this like to this. It improves like 35%. So, the problem we found is that named URL is slow. And the solution for fixing this is already here. I mean, if the buffer is array-based, you can just make the link to call to be a future object. So, it's kind of done. Or another solution is that maybe we can cache the results in memory using Rails cache or something. I actually created this two years ago, so check this out. So, conclusion, sorry for the overtime. So, I'm going to close my talk with revising what we learned today. First, we learned we have so many slow things in our applications and maybe we can solve some of them with Ruby threads, maybe. And you can find what's slow in your application and you can fix it. If the problem lies in the framework, go ahead, hack the framework. Next, to investigate the performance problem in the framework, perhaps you need to do a lot of monkey-patching. Good luck. Next, what I learned through programming, like preparing this talk is that thread programming is very hard. I don't want to do that anymore. So, future plans. I'm going to finish implementing these plugins and I'd like to put them in actual production applications. And probably I want to improve Rails to accept more of these kind of monkey patches, I mean patches or monkey patches. That's it. So, have fun with hacking for the performance. That's all. Thank you.