China’s Global Security Initiative in South Asia

In 2025, South Asian governments confronted mixed signals about China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI). While Beijing promoted the initiative at major regional forums, Nepal stopped short of endorsing it, reflecting broader skepticism among smaller states wary of Chinese security outreach. Such reticence points to ongoing debate over the GSI’s meaning and utility in a region marked by strategic reordering and intensifying great-power rivalry.

Launched by President Xi Jinping in April 2022, the GSI was presented as a response to a destabilizing, alliance-driven international security order. Framed around principles such as “indivisible security” (安全不可分割), respect for sovereignty, and opposition to bloc politics, the initiative portrays China as a stabilizing actor rather than a revisionist challenger. South Asia, a region at the intersection of China’s strategic concerns – border security, competition with India, protection of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investments, and influence across the Indian Ocean – has become the most visible testing ground for this approach.

Although marketed as cooperative and inclusive, the GSI in South Asia functions less as a regional security architecture than as a strategic narrative and policy umbrella – legitimizing bilateral engagements while subtly challenging India’s regional primacy and Western-led security norms. In practice, it is less about collective security than about shaping how security is defined, who provides it, and under what terms.

The Global Security Initiative: Norms Without Institutions

The GSI, one element of Beijing’s broader “global governance” agenda over the past five years, frames security as a universal goal grounded in six core commitments. It promotes a holistic approach to security that is common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable, while emphasizing respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The initiative claims to align with the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, stresses the importance of considering the legitimate security concerns of all countries, promotes the peaceful resolution of disputes through dialogue, and underscores the need to address both traditional and non-traditional security challenges – including terrorism, climate risks, cyber threats, and biosecurity. Collectively, these commitments articulate a normative framework that prioritizes stability, dialogue, and protection of state authority while broadening the conventional understanding of international security.

The GSI is neither a formal doctrine nor a military alliance. It operates as an infrastructure for security governance, replicating China’s internal control systems abroad – privileging state authority over coordination, insulation over integration, and hierarchy over horizontal cooperation. Unlike formal alliances such as NATO, it offers no membership criteria, mutual defense commitments, or permanent institutions. It functions at the level of norms and discourse, repackaging long-standing elements of Chinese foreign policy as an alternative to the U.S.-led security order.

The initiative aggregates norms that privilege order over openness, authority over accountability, and stability over contestation – recasting these as legitimate foundations of international security. Security is defined not as the management of shared risks through interoperable institutions, but as the prevention of disorder through sovereign control, regime resilience, and preemptive stabilization. It offers a parallel normative ecosystem in which hierarchy, selective cooperation, and domestic insulation are presented as prudent and exportable.

Exporting Security Without Constraints

At its core, the GSI reflects Beijing’s unease with alliance politics and security arrangements that legitimize external intervention. By criticizing “Cold War mentality” and military blocs, China positions itself as a defender of strategic autonomy – a message that resonates with many developing countries wary of entanglement in great-power rivalry.

The absence of binding commitments gives Beijing flexibility. The GSI neither constrains Chinese behavior nor obliges it to provide security guarantees. Bilateral cooperation – arms sales, training programs, intelligence sharing, and internal security assistance – can instead be framed as contributions to a broader global good.

This contrasts sharply with prevailing global security frameworks. While NATO institutionalizes reciprocity, interoperability, and shared political commitments, the GSI favors discretionary, bilateral provision. Similarly, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) conditions sovereignty on civilian protection, whereas the GSI prioritizes regime authority and views external intervention as destabilizing. Relative to U.N. peacekeeping, which emphasizes consent, mediation, and political process, the GSI focuses on internal security capacity, surveillance, and coercive stabilization.

Even compared to authoritarian regional organizations, it functions less as a collective institution than as a scalable platform for exporting control-oriented norms.

Why South Asia Matters to Beijing

South Asia’s strategic location, fragmented politics, and regional rivalries make it an ideal testing ground for the GSI’s flexible, norm-driven approach. The region borders sensitive areas within China – including Tibet and Xinjiang – and provides access to the Indian Ocean, critical for trade, energy, and strategic maritime routes. Crucially, it includes India – the only regional power capable of challenging China on land, at sea, and in shaping norms.

Internal fragmentation increases the region’s strategic value for Beijing. Weak institutions, persistent rivalries, and uneven development leave many states receptive to external partners offering investment, diplomatic support, and security cooperation without political conditionality. The GSI offers a unifying frame for these interactions, allowing China to present its footprint as stabilizing rather than expansionist – a particularly attractive proposition for governments concerned with regime security, internal unrest, or economic fragility.

Pakistan exemplifies how the GSI reinforces an already deep security partnership, described as an “all-weather friendship.” Long before the initiative’s announcement, China and Pakistan had extensive military, intelligence, and counterterrorism ties. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) further raised Pakistan’s strategic importance, creating significant Chinese stakes in domestic stability.

In the case of Pakistan, the GSI adds normative legitimacy rather than new material substance. Existing cooperation – arms transfers, joint exercises, internal security support – is recast as part of a global vision for peace and stability. Chinese officials routinely cite Pakistan as a model partner, emphasizing shared views on sovereignty and opposition to external interference.

For Beijing, Pakistan demonstrates how the GSI can normalize security engagement without formal alliances, while Pakistan leverages the initiative to signal alignment with China and bolster domestic legitimacy.

China’s engagement in Sri Lanka has been driven primarily by infrastructure and economic investment, particularly port development. While Beijing denies intentions for military facilities, strategic implications are clear, given Sri Lanka’s debt vulnerabilities and location along key Indian Ocean shipping lanes.

During Sri Lanka’s recent economic crisis, Beijing emphasized national ownership and resistance to external political pressure. The GSI provides cover for deeper engagement, enabling strategic access while avoiding perceptions of militarization, exemplifying “intervention-lite” influence.

In Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Maldives, the GSI’s appeal lies more in normative language than material offerings. These states, cautious of India’s dominance and the China-U.S. rivalry, can engage China on security issues – law enforcement, training, technology – without signaling alignment against India or the West.

For smaller states, the GSI functions as a hedging instrument, enabling capacity-building and diplomatic influence without full commitment to a great-power bloc. By framing China as a stabilizing partner, the initiative allows nuanced, multi-vector diplomacy in a polarized environment.

India’s Skepticism and Strategic Pushback

New Delhi views the GSI not as cooperative but as a tool to expand Chinese influence while undermining India’s regional primacy. Its rhetoric of “indivisible security” rings hollow against China’s aggression along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), infrastructure projects in disputed areas, and deepening ties with Pakistan. Strategically, these moves reinforce India’s perception of the GSI as a vehicle for normative leverage rather than cooperative security.

India has promoted alternative security architectures to blunt the GSI’s appeal. The Quad – comprising the United States, Japan, Australia, and India – has expanded defense cooperation and joint exercises, while India has increased engagement across Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Europe. Policies such as “Look West” and “Link West” communicate a multi-vector hedging strategy aimed at fortifying influence, offering alternative architectures, and reinforcing a rules-based order.

Normatively, India criticizes the GSI’s focus on sovereignty and regime stability over broader accountability, seeing it as legitimizing selective intervention aligned with Chinese interests. While the initiative may appeal to hedging states, it struggles to overcome entrenched distrust where China is perceived as a direct security threat.

Regional and Global Implications

South Asia serves as both a proving ground and a constraint. The diffusion of the GSI weakens fragile regional institutions such as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), making security cooperation increasingly fragmented and personalized, shaped by great power competition. Normatively, the initiative challenges liberal approaches that link security to democratic governance and human rights.

Beyond South Asia, if the GSI gains traction, it could fragment global security governance, structuring cooperation around norms rather than commitments and institutions, and defining stability by regime resilience rather than collective responsibility.

The GSI’s principal strength lies in flexibility: China advances a consistent normative vision while tailoring engagement to diverse South Asian contexts. Yet this same flexibility limits institutional weight – the absence of binding commitments or enforcement structures raises questions of accountability and durability.

South Asian states are active agents navigating Beijing’s initiative. Some use it to deepen bilateral cooperation; others treat it as a hedging tool, selectively embracing, resisting, or diluting its principles. This highlights both the initiative’s normative appeal and its limits where autonomy, strategic balance, and rivalry matter.

Rather than a collective security framework, the GSI functions as a normative platform. Its value to Beijing lies less in institution-building than in narrative power: contesting liberal norms, challenging alliance-based models, and normalizing hierarchical order.

For now, the initiative remains what it has been from the outset: strategy wrapped in the language of security.