China is fully aware about India's maritime and aerospace capabilities and is also monitoring the Indo-US relations albeit with a certain amount of "suspicion", an expert on Sino-India relations said here.
"China realises and recognises that India has made advances and has indigenous capabilities in maritime and aerospace arena," said Lora Saalman, associate, Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy in Beijing.
Saalman was delivering a talk on 'Fractured Mirrors: Chinese Views of India Deterrence' at the Administrative Staff College of India here last evening organised by the US Consulate General Hyderabad.
She said Chinese are closely looking at the US-Indo relationship, adding "There is an argument on a side in China that India's relationship with US allows it to maintain a smaller (nuclear) arsenal."
"The focus has been on India-US relations in the last one decade (after the visit of Clinton and lifting of US sanctions on India). This kind of movement for greater engagement between the two countries (India-US) has been seen with certain amount of suspicion within China on what is the US and India's intention behind this," she said.
"When it comes to views on India's nuclear deterrence, domestic discourse (in China) becomes more fractious. A survey of Chinese sources uncovers over ten terms used to describe India's deterrence posture that reflect three primary shifts from defensive to offensive, regional to global and denial to control," she added.