“Creating New Asia: Sino-Indian Friendship and the Promise of Asian Solidarity in the Early Cold War, 1947-1962” highlights how the Cold War produced ‘friendship’ as a new political paradigm in India and China. Prevailing views of Sino-Indian relations in this period characterize ‘friendship’ as vacuous and unimportant. By treating it seriously as a contingent form of politics, I show how state and private actors in both countries defined friendship as a uniquely Asian mode of solidarity that promoted mutual respect in service of the regional priorities of nation-building and anti-imperialism. Advocates of Sino-Indian friendship emphasized that it accepted adopting different solutions to shared ‘Asian’ problems and could act as the framework for a New Asia based on mutual learning and coexistence instead of colonial paternalism and bloc conflict, thus ensuring regional peace at a time of rising global tensions. Consequently, friendship’s invocation of a regional struggle convinced different publics in China and India that successful nation-building at home required resolving Cold War crises abroad, and vice-versa. Sino-Indian friendship inflected postcolonial nationalism with transnational urgency; being Indian or Chinese also meant being Asian. By studying Sino-Indian friendship’s rise and fall, this work makes three key scholarly contributions. Firstly, I argue that friendship’s vision of a different international order reflected postcolonial societies’ desire for an alternative to Cold War geopolitical norms. Indian and Chinese actors defined Asia as a region that had experienced imperialism and was now threatened by superpower interventions and global conflict. Empires and blocs alike offered rigid hierarchies and ideological tutelage. In contrast, Sino-Indian friendship promised a New Asia that, united by colonial trauma and a desire for peace, would be governed by the ‘Asian’ values of cosmopolitanism and horizontal relations. Secondly, I contend that Sino-Indian friendship’s framing as ‘Asian’ showcases how regional lenses mediate the relationship between national and international politics. The Indian and Chinese states invoked the ideals of New Asia to encourage disparate publics to participate in national initiatives, and those same publics, from Buddhist monks to factory workers, framed their specific political agendas as inherently ‘Asian’ and internationally important, even if they were at odds with the state’s. These diffuse invocations of New Asia rendered international struggles legible to local audiences and helped them hold their new governments accountable to promises of a better future. Finally, rather than ending with the Sino-Indian War in 1962, I argue that the language of Sino-Indian friendship and a New Asia lived various afterlives in Japan and Southeast Asia and has continued to affect Chinese and Indian foreign policy up to the present day. I thus ask the following questions: Why did Indian and Chinese actors pursue friendship between both countries? How did this friendship become ‘Asian’? What impact did this project have on both countries’ domestic politics? And how do Sino-Indian imaginations of New Asia affect our understanding of the relationship between nationalism, internationalism, and the Cold War?