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| Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Tianjin on August 31, 2025. |
The August meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Tianjin – was hailed by many commentators as a purported “reset” to Sino-Indian relations. These same voices would herald the meeting as auguring more positive consolidation and deepening of strategic ties between the two sides.
Whilst the meeting provided a crucial opportunity for a tactical reset to bilateral relations, there would be no substantive reorientation towards genuine relational normalisation between Beijing and New Delhi. A floor was constructed – but it was a tenuous one.
A week after the summit, an extraordinary BRICS summit of leaders was convened by Brazil. Modi dispatched seasoned veteran diplomat S. Jaishankar as his representative. Both Brazil and India took the opportunity to criticise the “increasing barriers and complicating [of] transactions” via the weaponisation of trade and finance by select geopolitical actors – yet both pulled back from overtly castigating the U.S..
Over the past two months, Modi has wished Trump a happy birthday with an accompanying call, tasked Jaishankar with meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, and affirmed the “good progress” being made over trade negotiations in early October. Whilst evident damage was inflicted upon the relationship by Trump's erratic, capricious rhetoric and gestures – widely perceived by the Indian public, and partially wielded by Modi's opponents, as visceral snubs to India – there remains a fundamental reticence to break away from the long-standing economic and more fledgling military-security partnership between India and the U.S.
The Significant Stakes in A Sino-Indian Reset
For Chinese and Indian leadership alike, the tactical case for setting a floor could not be any clearer. To this effect, two prominent explanations have emerged in recent discourse.
The first view posits that Trump's arbitrary treatment of India in his trade policies, clear divergences over the war in Ukraine and the Indo-Russian partnership, as well as broader prevarication in relation to mini-lateral groupings such as the Quad, have empowered voices within Delhi long wary of the U.S.' degree of strategic commitment to the region. Influential advocates of a more pragmatic approach towards China, including highly influential National Security Advisor Ajit Doval KC and Foreign Secretary Shri Vikram Misri, have played a key role in facilitating this shift. For one, Doval primarily spearheaded many rounds of talks with his Chinese counterpart, Politburo member Wang Yi, which culminated in the ten points of consensus on the border question in August.
The second view alludes to Beijing and Delhi's growing heft in the Global South, the rising geopolitical stature of emerging economies and developing countries in ASEAN (geographically sandwiched between China and India, with which they collectively comprise what Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani dubs the “CIA countries”), Latin America, Africa, Central and West Asia, and the fact that both powers can work together in advancing shared interests of global governance in these regions. Whilst Chinese state rhetoric fervently champions this view, the Chinese saying, “sharing the same bed but not the same dreams,” captures the limitations to this force as a basis for genuine alignment between Beijing and Delhi. The two political leaderships are vigorously competing for leverage and influence over the ascendant Global South – China through manufacturing offerings and infrastructural development, and India with its emerging market, demographic and talent dividend, and service sector strengths.
Whilst China's relationship with the U.S. remains an important pillar to the country's worldview and strategic wherewithal, what is increasingly equally important for its Politburo members – if not more so – is China's standing within the Global South and global governance structures. This shift in emphasis can be gleaned off the substantially more geographically diffuse and thematically expansive declarations emerging from the four Global Initiatives (4GIs) rolled out by the leadership in recent years. Such initiatives are vital in anchoring the regime's ongoing efforts to project legitimacy not only in a purely inward-oriented fashion, but in courting the Global South demographic, before which China is eager to present its case for recognition.
Similarly, the Indian leadership is precipitously wary of the warming relations between Washington and Islamabad – spurred by the personal “friendship” between Trump and Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir, aided by their shared interest in cryptocurrencies, and perhaps best reflected by Shebhaz Sharif's fervent praise for Trump as a “man of peace” at the Gaza peace conference. Indeed, the Indian Subcontinent could well be witnessing one of the most remarkable tectonic shifts in recent years, with Pakistan drifting closer to the U.S. on geo-military issues (vis-à-vis the Taliban in Afghanistan, for instance) and economic alignment (with a pullback from engagement with China); whether this creates the urgency and room for more thorough Sino-Indian synergy, remains to be seen.
The Barriers that Persist
Yet we should not be mistaken about the ease of improvement in the Sino-Indian relationship. Beijing and Delhi are symmetrically concerned about being “encircled” or “contained” by one another. Indian commentators and pundits have repeatedly labelled China's partnerships and engagement with its neighbours, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives, as primary indicators of an “encirclement trap.”A select few have even advocated a “counter-encirclement policy,” whereby an expansion in Indian naval bases and the forging of more enduring ties with foreign policy rivals to China, would be key parts of the broader reactive strategy barring China from greater strategic wherewithal in the Indian Ocean.
Trade and investment barriers remain entrenched. On the Indian front, deeply rooted protectionist sentiments have meant that import restrictions, licensing requirements, and inspection protocols remain prohibitive barriers for Chinese entrants into the market. Certification and approval remain key hurdles enmeshed in bureaucratic uncertainty. On the other hand, despite pledges to “open up” further, a vast bulk of the Chinese market remains strictly impenetrable for Indian investors and exporters, given challenges in aligning expectations on working conditions and broader commercial modus operandi. Mutual restrictions on technologies – especially India-imposed barriers to Chinese telecommunications – will remain a sore point of contention, especially as Chinese companies seek to diversify their supply chains away from their highly involuted domestic sector.
Setting aside territorial disputes, economic rivalry, technological securitisation, the most fundamental elephant in the room remains the lack of understanding. The numbers of Indian and Chinese citizens who can and do travel frequently to one another, or reside in one another, remain frighteningly low – approximately 56,000 Indians in mainland China as of 2023, with no reliable assessments of Chinese in India. How can the two countries cultivate genuine expertise about and of one another, if their peoples are not meeting, talking, and living on the ground of the other?
Low Hanging Fruits?
There is no quick fix for the present hurdles. Yet if the Sino-Indian relationship is to genuinely flourish in the long term, it is imperative that we start with some of the low hanging-fruits.
The first and foremost is the substantial increase to the volume, frequency, depth, and quality of student and academic exchanges. Whilst the issuance of visa will remain a persistent obstacle at the level of tourists and general travel, both Ministries of Education should look towards considerably streamlining the process and promoting channels via which their respective student and higher education populations can arrange for travel to one another's key education destinations – e.g. Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Guangzhou for China, and Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore in India. From reducing visa hurdles to establishing and even prioritising particular direct flights, there is much that can be done on this front, to encourage city-to-city exchanges conducted by private citizens – chiefly and primarily researchers, professors, and the youth with which they work.
The second recommendation concerns the deepening of focussed horizontal (state-to-province) and vertical (i.e. technocratic ministry/bureaucracy-centric – e.g. financial officials and academics, lawyers and judges, and even architects and civil engineers) engagement that aims to both de-politicise the bilateral relationship through reframing it around common grounds and best-practice sharing, and provide demonstrable proofs of concept that the forging of common interest between India and China is not merely hypothetical.
Indeed, Hong Kong – as the only Special Administrative Region on Chinese soil practising common law and with English as an official language – is well placed to serve as a genuine bridge between China and India. The SAR government should lobby the Delhi Ministry of External Affairs to re-issue the suspended e-visas to Hong Kong passport holders, as well as setting the accomplishment of mutually granted visa-free stay as a medium-term goal.
These low hanging fruits may seem trivial – yet great shifts cannot take place without piecemeal changes. Step-by-step, plank by plank, bridge-builders must march on – unperturbed by noise or possible backlash.
