BRICS is viewed as an alternative to a US-dominated global order, and US President Donald Trump has repeatedly issued threats against the grouping.
Relations between India and China were severely affected after clashes along their nearly 2,200-mile-long border in June 2020, in which 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed.
Both countries have several reasons to stabilise their relationship. For India, one of them is concern over President Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy. Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “There is no magic reset button for fully normalising ties. India and China have multiple sources of friction, including overlapping territorial claims, competition to lead the developing countries of the so-called Global South, and deep disagreements over China’s close partnership with Pakistan. Real rapprochement will not be easy.”
Gautam Bambawale, India’s former ambassador to China, considers talk of a reset in India-China relations premature. Bambawale told Sadanand Dhume that the 2020 clashes “pushed relations back 10 steps”, while recent signs of easing tensions indicate “at most three steps forward”.
Following the violence in 2020, India increased the deployment of thousands of troops along the border, banned around 60 Chinese apps, including TikTok and WeChat, effectively kept Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE out of the expansion of India’s 5G telecommunications network, suspended tourist visas for Chinese citizens and deepened cooperation with the Quad group comprising the United States, Japan and Australia.
Over the past two years, however, India-China relations have shown partial improvement. In 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia.
Last year, during his first visit to China in nearly seven years, Modi travelled to Tianjin to attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, or SCO. It is a security alliance led by China and Russia.
The two countries have resumed high-level talks over the border dispute and reached agreements concerning military patrolling in two disputed areas. In October, Indian airline IndiGo began flights from Kolkata to Guangzhou, restoring direct air connectivity between India and China after five years.
What explains these changes? A possible indication came last week from former Indian Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan.
Chauhan said, “Our relations with China cannot be held hostage only to the issue of border disputes. China and India are two major powers in Asia, large economies and ancient civilisations. That is also important. The two countries cooperate in some areas, compete for influence and markets, and have differences in their views on some aspects of the regional as well as global order.”
Manoj Kewalramani, a China affairs expert at the Takshashila Institution, told Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume that India may have quietly abandoned the insistence that progress towards normalising relations must depend on China agreeing to restore the situation that existed before the 2020 border clashes. He said there is a quiet understanding in New Delhi that the world has changed and that there is a power gap between China and India.
Dhume wrote that Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy has weakened those in India who favour a hard line towards China. In his second term, Trump has imposed heavy tariffs on India for buying Russian oil, moved closer to Pakistan and given less importance to the Quad. He has also considered the possibility of creating a G2 arrangement with China.
Before the SCO summit on September 1, the Chinese president had made only one foreign trip this year. In June, he made his first state visit to North Korea in seven years. Meanwhile, the world continued travelling to China. According to the US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, more than 20 leaders, including US President Donald Trump, had visited Beijing during the first half of the year.
Xi Jinping arrived in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, on August 30 to attend the SCO summit. Xi Jinping then made his first state visit to Egypt in a decade. China has strengthened its presence in Egypt’s Suez Canal region through the bilateral economic and trade cooperation zone.
Xi could then attend BRICS, another summit of leaders from non-Western countries. It would be Xi’s first visit to India since 2019 and his first visit to India since the deadly border clashes between the two countries in 2020.
According to Chinese customs data, bilateral trade between China and India rose 12.4% last year to a record $155 billion, more than double the $71.6 billion recorded 10 years earlier. During the first seven months of this year, bilateral trade increased another 23% compared with the same period last year.
Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center, told the Financial Times that, in China’s view, India is currently going through a period of change because of Trump’s policies. She said measures to increase access to India and improve relations are aimed at bringing New Delhi closer to China.
She said, “China wants to influence India’s strategic choices. It wants an India that does not see China as a threat. It also wants India not to stand with the US because of China.”
Following recent India-China talks in Beijing, an article published in Chinese state media by People’s Daily commentator Ding Gang said both sides had “accepted that American influence has affected their relationship and has been a continuous, unspoken presence. But that situation is now changing. The American shadow that was so clearly present in talks several years ago is gradually fading, not because of diplomatic efforts by the two sides, but because the international order itself is undergoing a profound change.”
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