Now for the hard part: another ‘informal summit’ is over but China and India are no closer on core issues
- Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi must address the difficult questions surrounding the fundamentals of their countries’ relationship, Ankit Panda says
- Leaders may have grown used to sharing the stage for photo opportunities, but the geopolitical issues that divide their nations remain
Candid exchanges between the two, therefore, are meant to pave the way for progress. However, there’s little indication that this sort of progress is really under way as part of the Wuhan-Mamallapuram process.
China claims the entirety of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as “South Tibet”, and India claims China-occupied Aksai Chin as part of its territory. These issues have been part of talks for years, but a final, comprehensive settlement remains distant, even after 2017 when the armed forces of the two countries went eyeball-to-eyeball along the border.
If appearances at Mamallapuram are to be believed, the relationship continues in its post-Wuhan summit “reset”. However, look closer and the geopolitical unease between India and China bubbles to the surface.
According to Xinhua’s view of the meeting, China emphasised the need for both sides to “correctly view each other’s development and enhance strategic mutual trust”.
The message? Neither side should allow external influences to affect their relationship. This summit, of course, came just weeks after the first foreign minister-level meeting of the reconvened “quadrilateral” involving the United States, India, Japan and Australia on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Neither China nor India has forgotten about the broader tensions underlying their relationship.
In Kathmandu, Xi elevated the relationship between the two countries and was likely to have marked what will someday be seen as a watershed moment in Nepal’s geopolitical drift out of India’s orbit, where it had lingered for decades.
The Modi government has its foreign policy tastes and predilections, but India’s primary grand strategic goal remains its own economic uplifting. Even as relations with China remain difficult – and are likely to become more so in the years ahead – it will be difficult for New Delhi to totally and decisively pivot away from its neighbour to the north.
And so, at Mamallapuram, it was economic issues that were the easiest to discuss and announce: rebalancing trade, encouraging mutual investors, and deepening economic cooperation. For India, in particular, slowing economic indicators make China’s salience as a neighbour and investor all the more important.
The story of India and China in the near term will be more of the same. The competitive dynamic will persist but its effects will be managed before they can spiral out of control.
The informal summits – an Indian idea – may have their place as long as Xi and Modi sit in control in Beijing and Delhi but their effect will be far from transformative. Another such meeting will take place next year in China.
For now, India and China remain as far apart as ever on the fundamentals. And given their interests and mutual suspicions, no amount of meetings can change that.
Ankit Panda is a senior editor at The Diplomat