The economic pressure of US President Donald Trump seems to be bringing up the relationship between India and China, which had been frozen for over five years.
For the first time since 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to China from this Sunday (31) to participate in a summit organized by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The visit happens after Trump imposes 50% tariffs on imports of Indian products.
In a moment of geopolitical tension, the leaders of India and China – who have fought brutal to the border in 2020 – can now tighten their hands and prioritize economic stability to the detriment of rivalry.
Alongside Modi, Russia’s world leaders, Pakistan, Iran and Asia will join Xi Jinping this weekend for what Beijing calls “A, a regional security group founded by Russia and China to reshape the balance of global power.
The presence of India at the event is the most revealing example of the narrowing of ties between the two Asian powers – a realignment that threatens to undo years of US efforts to keep New Delhi as counterweight to China in the region.
Although the relationship between India and China was already narrowing in recent times, analysts claim that Trump’s “America First” policies are led the two leaders, who built their political marks on a solid base of nationalism, to explore a necessary partnership.
Trump’s tariffs on India
The rates of about India as a punishment for the purchase of Russian oil has been especially difficult for Modi, who had a friendship relationship with Trump during the first term of the US president.
The threat of rates “generated a certain degree of urgency” in New Delhi to stabilize widening with Beijing, said Manoj Kewalramani, who leads the Indo-Pacific studies of the Takshashila institution in the Indian city of Bengaluru.
However, he stated that this is not the “main driver” for a reconfiguration of the relationship, as New Delhi and Beijing also seek to stabilize the ties for national interests themselves.
Several White House governments have been working to strengthen strategic ties with India through technology transfers and joint military exercises, with the aim of combating China, which has been increasingly assertive in the Indo-Pacific region.
Losing India would be “the worst result” to the US, analysts say.
Improvements in relationship between China and India
Following a meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Prime Minister Modi in New Delhi last week, both sides recognized improvements in the tense relationship.
“India-China relations have been constantly progressed, guided by respect for their interests and sensibilities,” said the Indian leader. “Stable, predictable and constructive ties between India and China will contribute significantly to regional and global peace and prosperity.”
Beijing’s view, according to Yun Sun, director of the China program of the Think Tank Stimson Center in Washington, is that “this calm was definitely started by Trump.”
“India can no longer pretend it still has strong support (from Washington),” Sun said. Therefore, Beijing’s view is that, as the US “retreated”, New Deli needs to “recalibrate its foreign policy and improve its relationship with China.”
But analysts claim that the summit is unlikely to inaugurate a total realignment.
“For me, it is not a redefinition in the sense that India is saying ‘we are fed up in America.’ This will not happen,” says Kewalramani. “The United States is still the most important partner (from India) in the world, but China is our greatest neighbor. We have to live with it.”
From friendship to rivalry
The trajectory of India-China relations has evolved from a postcolonial partnership to a modern strategic rivalry.
New Delhi was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with the Popular Republic of China in 1950, a decade characterized by a shared view of Asian solidarity.
This friendship was, however, shaken by the 1962 Sino-Indian war, a brief but brutal conflict that left a legacy of deep distrust and an unresolved border dispute.
In the following decades, countries’ leaders have taken steps to build economic ties that led to bilateral trade growth, despite persistent tensions on their common border.
But deadly clashes in the Galwan Valley in 2020 – which left at least 20 Indian soldiers and four dead Chinese – violently altered this balance.
“The confrontations of 2020 are not simply something India can leave behind,” said Farwa Aamer, director of initiatives from Southern Asia at Asia Society Policy Institute.
Instead, the goal is to ensure that episodes like this are not repeated, and this is what the reconstruction of the relationship is based on a joint search for border stability.
There was a gradual standardization of the ties between New Déli and Beijing after Modi and Xi met on the banks of the BRICS summit in Russia in October 2024.
Among countries, canceled since the covid-19 pandemic.
Beijing recently agreed to reopen two pilgrimage sites in Western Tibet to Indians for the first time in five years, and the two countries began to re -review tourist visas for each other’s citizens.
Political strategies
The reconfiguration of the ties of India and China is an example of the policy of strategic autonomy, which prioritizes national interests to the detriment of rigid fidelity to a block.
At the OCX summit, in addition to Xi Jinping, Modi will be in the presence of the Prime Minister of Pakistan, with whom India has recently been involved in a deadly conflict, and Russia, whose continuous oil sales for India since AE led Trump to impose 25% tariffs on Indian products such as punishment.
This involvement with a Beijing -dominated bloc is heavily contrasts with the deepening of India’s ties with the Quad – a security group with the US, Japan and Australia – which is seen as a democratic counterweight to the growing influence of China in the Indian Ocean.
With the impasse in the border dispute, New Delhi is choosing to isolate the diplomatic and economic imperatives of the security conflict with Beijing, according to Kewalramani.
“Although both sides know that there are structural challenges and that this relationship will remain difficult, the two realize that a deterioration is not in anyone’s interest,” he said.
The path to stability
The strategic reconfiguration of India in relation to Beijing is based less on an attenuated security stance and more on economic need.
Last year, China was the second largest commercial partner in New Delhi, after the US, with a bilateral trade of $ 118 billion, according to data from the India Department of Commerce.
India depends on Beijing not only, but also for essential intermediate products and raw materials that supply their own industries.
However, this economic tangle is under the shadow of the tense military reality.
Any negotiations between Modi and XI would be complicated by tens of thousands of soldiers still positioned in, and this unresolved conflict remains the main obstacle to the reconstruction of trust.
Last week, both sides agreed with ten points on the border issue, including the maintenance of “peace and tranquility,” according to a statement from the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As Tanvi Madan, senior researcher at the Asian Policy Study Center in the Brookings Institution Foreign Policy Program, “it is unclear if both sides will actually trust each other.”
According to her, the main test is whether leaders’ rhetoric will translate into a reduction in tension in practice, something that has failed before.
The future of the India-China relationship will be defined by their ability to manage this delicate dance.
The future, said Aamer of Asia Society, will bring “perhaps a more stable relationship, where the competition is not necessarily over, but the conflict is under control.”
