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Opinion | Why India and China need to stay friends: it’s all about the economy
- New Delhi wants to cut its trade deficit with China, gain access to its markets and lure manufacturers to set up in India
- Beijing, meanwhile, wants India to join the RCEP free-trade agreement and use Huawei’s 5G technology, while being mindful of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor tensions
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Border tensions between China and Bhutan in 2017 left Indian and Chinese troops facing off on the Doklam Plateau for 70 days. The crisis led Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to institutionalise their informal summits to avoid a repeat of such confrontations.
The two nuclear powers met for an informal summit in April last year in Wuhan, where Xi said: “Conducting great cooperation by our two great countries can generate worldwide influence”, adding that he hoped the meeting would “usher in a new chapter of China-India relations”. Yet Indian and Chinese troops again faced off in eastern Ladakh on September 11 this year, underscoring the volatility of the region.
To move beyond the situation, Indian and Chinese army officers met on October 1 at the Bumla border for National Day celebrations hosted by China. It is no wonder that India and China have been described as “frenemies”, given the complexity of their relationship.
These periodic confrontations notwithstanding, Beijing and New Delhi recognise the need to address the real and exigent issues in their countries: the economy and economic development. It is in both their interests to get their relationship back on track.
Meeting in Mamallapuram for their second informal summit, on October 11 and 12, Xi told Modi, in a refrain from Wuhan, that China and India – both important engines of world economic growth – should be good neighbours and friends. He added that they should “enhance dovetailing of the two countries’ development strategies” to build a “manufacturing partnership”.
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