Singapore is located at the southern end of the Straits of Malacca, the shortest sea route between China and India. Geography has moulded Singapore's self-definition much as it has shaped the contours of the rest of Southeast Asia: south of China, east of India. Placed within overlapping Sinic and Indic zones, Singapore's entrepôt role has served both. Today, as China and India emerge as rising powers, a port city is going beyond its trading role to engage them in political and security terms. This study examines how Singapore is positioning itself between China and India, two ancient entities rising simultaneously today. Singapore's engagement of China — like Beijing's contemporary engagement of Southeast Asia — is deeper, longer and more substantial than India's reach into the region. However, New Delhi is trying vigorously to make up for lost time. Its ties with Singapore are patently a part of that effort. The structure of this book, which treats Singapore's relations with China far more extensively than its relations with India, reflects the inherent asymmetry of the two Asian giants' contemporary interaction with the city-state and the region. However, this book examines how New Delhi is shaping up into a Southeast Asian player by extending its already preponderant influence in South Asia.

Much scholarly work now is focused on the economic rationale for the upswing in relations between a liberalizing India and a regionalizing Singapore, a development that replicates Singapore's economic rapprochement with China in the 1970s. However, the political and security aspects of the citystate's relations with the two regional powers are no less important because Southeast Asia is a part of the theatre of engagement between Beijing and New Delhi, a theatre that offers India a potential role as a counterweight to China. Singapore's pivotal position at the intersection of the two powers' emerging influence gives it an importance larger than would be suggested by its miniscule size. Singapore is important, too, to Japan and Russia, but these two existing great powers are outside the scope of this study, which focuses on the new gravitational orbit created by rising powers China and India. Singapore's relations with the two countries have implications not only for itself but for the region. This is a study of the evolution of those relations.