“…We argue that FOIP underscores an expansion of Japan's strategic horizon to balance Chinese economic and naval advancement into the Indian Ocean, and that Chinese regional overtures ought to be understood as a tactical détente, at best, as infrastructure loans extend to key strategic regions − such as the Pacific Islands, Eastern Africa and South Asia − that have been given only cursory scholarly attention as playgrounds of Sino-Japanese global rivalry. After all, the academic literature has traditionally focused on Japan-China infrastructure competition in Africa, Latin America and the whole Eurasian landmass, with the notable exception of South Asia (Murashkin, 2020;Levy & Rose, 2019;Schulze, 2019;Wallace, 2019;Hirono, 2019;Sinkkonen, 2019). In fact, Japan's FOIP proactively tackles that very macroregion that spans two oceans on the basis of a maritime geopolitical vision that empowers the rimlands to keep the fast-rising continental power away from "control of the seas", not least because naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan is well-read and widely cited by contemporary Chinese and Japanese decisionmakers (Yoshihara & Holmes, 2018;Zhang, 2009;Hu, 2015;Yachi, 2011;Yachi et al, 2015;Kanehara, 2011).…”