China’s Complicated Relationship With India

When the BRICS leaders gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, from August 22-24 for their 15th summit, there was a sense of awkwardness. One of the five leaders – Russian President Vladimir Putin – was not there, having agreed to attend virtually to spare South Africa the embarrassment of being technically required to arrest him upon arrival due to an outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court. And tensions remain thick between two of the four leaders who actually did attend: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Ahead of the BRICS summit, will-they-or-won’t-they questions swirled about the possibility of a Modi-Xi meeting. The two leaders have not held an official sit-down since border tensions boiled over into a deadly clash between the Chinese and Indian armies in June 2020. Since then, the two men have largely avoided each other, despite attending a number of multilateral summits together.

There were no recorded or announced interactions between them at the Uzbekistan-hosted Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in September 2022, for instance. Modi and Xi did speak briefly during a dinner at the G-20 summit in Indonesia last November, but had no private conversation.

In the end, Modi and Xi held a brief meeting on the sidelines of the summit, but they kept it low-profile: no formal announcement and no grip-and-grin photo. The interaction was described by both the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Indian External Affairs Ministry as a “conversation” rather than a formal “meeting.”

Indian officials clarified that there had not been a “scheduled meeting” between the two, saying that this was a brief “impromptu” encounter – possibly not even a private one. Cameras caught Xi and Modi speaking before taking their seats for the BRICS leaders’ joint media statements; it was unclear whether that was the “conversation” being referred to or whether they spoke at another time.

The descriptions of the talk from India and China – there were no formal readouts, just answers to questions from journalists – showcased the differing perspectives on their relationship. According to China’s Foreign Ministry, “Xi stressed that improving China-India relations serves the common interests of the two countries and peoples, and is also conducive to peace, stability and development of the world and the region. The two sides should bear in mind the overall interests of their bilateral relations and handle properly the border issue.”

For India, however, the relationship is all about the border. Modi “underlined that maintenance of peace and tranquility in the border areas and observing and respecting the LAC [Line of Actual Control] are essential for the normalization of the India-China relationship,” India’s foreign secretary said in response to a question about the Modi-Xi conversation. India also claimed that Modi and Xi had “agreed” to “intensify efforts at expeditious disengagement and de-escalation” along the border – something China conspicuously did not confirm.

The tensions still evident between China and India not only make BRICS gatherings awkward, but also undermine China’s lofty rhetoric of Global South solidarity.

On August 19, three days before the BRICS summit kicked off, China and India held their 19th round of corps commander-level talks seeking to advance disengagement along the Line of Actual Control that separates the two countries. The border dispute has been a major stumbling block for China-India relations since the spring of 2020, when Chinese troops crossed the LAC and seized de facto control of wide swaths of the disputed border area. The confrontation resulted in the deadliest Sino-Indian clash since their 1962 border war, with India reporting 20 of its soldiers killed and China reporting four killed in a skirmish in Galwan Valley.

The border clash provided a huge push to India’s interactions with the United States, now seen in New Delhi as a key partner for dealing with China’s aggression. Yet India-U.S. interests are not perfectly aligned, and Beijing seems to be holding out hope that it can forge a united front with India as part of broader Global South solidarity – an effort that Beijing, of course, expects to lead as first among equals.

This leads to an odd dynamic wherein China speaks in broad tones about South-South cooperation and BRICS unity while ignoring the elephant in the room: the ongoing standoff between Asia’s two largest developing countries. It’s hard to have Global South solidarity when Chinese and Indian troops are actively engaged in a standoff.

Further complicating matters, China’s message to the Global South places a heavy emphasis on anti-American sentiment – ignoring that many fellow developing countries have deep and mutually beneficial relationships with the United States. India increasingly sees the United States as a crucial partner in its national security plans, and while there is robust debate in New Delhi about the nature and future of India-U.S. cooperation, hectoring by China is more likely to backfire than convince Indian policymakers.

For example, China issued a stern warning about the United States to the developing world in a speech given by Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao at the BRICS Business Forum. “Some country, obsessed with maintaining its hegemony, has gone out of its way to cripple the EMDCs [emerging markets and development countries]. Whoever is developing fast becomes its target of containment; whoever is catching up becomes its target of obstruction.”

This is a warning that Chinese analysts have specifically aimed at India in the past: U.S. policies target China today, but they will target India tomorrow. The argument is that Washington simply cannot accept near-peer competitors and so will eventually turn on India as it continues to grow.

China thus maintains that the BRICS countries should “support multilateralism and the democratization of international relations,” a common refrain China uses to promote the overhaul of the global order to increase representation of the developing world. On the macro level, there is undeniable truth to that. There’s a reason the individual BRICS countries came together in the first place: because their representation in the international system doesn’t suit today’s reality.

However, China prefers to ignore that it is effectively asking India to overlook incursions along its border in favor of promoting more nebulous common interests – something Beijing itself would never accept. (China could, for example, easily cement its position as the unquestioned leader and preferred partner of Southeast Asia by ceding its claims in the South China Sea, but that is not going to happen.)

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has made the argument directly to India that the two countries must partner up (against the United States, it is implied). “As the two largest developing countries in the world and eternal neighbors, China and India have much more common interests than differences, and it is of global demonstrative significance for the two countries to achieve common development and common prosperity,” Wang told Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in July. “The two sides should support each other and contribute to each other’s success, instead of undermining and doubting each other.”

From India’s perspective, the situation looks far different. New Delhi insists that it cannot engage meaningfully with China on other issues until the border situation is stabilized. The standoff has “eroded strategic trust and the public and political basis of the relationship,” India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval told Wang at the meeting of BRICS national security advisers in South Africa.

Both China and India see their relationship as deeply meaningful: “The two sides agreed that the India-China bilateral relationship is significant not only for the two countries but also for the region and world,” India’s readout of the Wang-Doval meeting noted. But from New Delhi’s view, China is asking India to sacrifice a core national interest – secure borders – in pursuit of “democratization” of the international order.

India is thus extremely skeptical when China pitches its concept of “universal security.” Wang Wentao’s speech at the BRICS Business Forum noted that “any attempt to … expand one’s own sphere of influence or squeeze other countries’ buffer of security can only create security predicament and insecurity for all countries.” Wang (and Xi, on whose behalf the speech was given) clearly was thinking of the U.S. as the country guilty of those sins; for India’s leaders, however, those words will bring China to mind.

India itself is a key leader in the Global South, so its deep suspicion toward China matters. China-India tensions undermine Beijing’s vision for the BRICS, as summed up in Xi Jinping’s speech at the summit: “We BRICS countries share extensive consensus and common goals. No matter how the international situation changes, our commitment to cooperation since the very beginning and our common aspiration will not change.”

“...This represents the direction of the advancement of human society, and will profoundly impact the development process of the world,” Xi added.

But China’s lofty rhetoric about “consensus and common goals” is more aspirational than real. Lou Chunhao, a researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICR), a think tank affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, highlighted the crux of the issue: “India believes a U.S.-led world order is more conducive to its interests than a China-led one would be.”

Writing in an op-ed for the state-run China Daily, Lou went on to argue against this perception. He wrote that that the strategy of “depending on and aligning with the U.S. to counter China” will backfire on India, warning that New Delhi will lose its much-vaunted “strategic autonomy.” Instead, China and India should be united in “pushing for changes to the global order, safeguarding developing countries' interests, promoting South-South cooperation and advancing their own modernization process. India should not fall into the US’ trap of ‘divide and rule.’”

While Lou ends up in the same place as Chinese officials – arguing that India should work with China, which somehow knows better than New Delhi what is in India’s interests – his piece is noteworthy in that it recognizes India’s very real concern with Chinese behavior. This is perhaps Beijing’s biggest challenge in the BRICS or other Global South groupings: Its flowery statements about common interests risk running aground on its aggressive pursuit of China’s own interests.