Follow us on social

2018-07-27t093234z_2022494017_rc1faa2f1f30_rtrmadp_3_safrica-brics-scaled

China-India cool things down. What does it really mean?

The two powers have decided to disengage militarily from their shared border —a first step, some say

Asia-Pacific

Right before last week’s 2024 BRICS summit in Russia, the Indian foreign ministry made an announcement — a landmark disengagement deal between India and China.

According to the deal, both sides will reduce the number of troops at the two unresolved friction points at the India-China border and resume their regular pattern of patrolling from before their deadly 2020 border clash. Later, at the summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jingping held a bilateral meeting, which was much more civil than their meeting last year, signaling a thaw in the tense India-China relationship.

This news is especially relevant to the United States, which has been growing closer to India over the past few decades on the assumption that it is a potentially powerful partner to balance China.

India and China have shared a largely peaceful, though sometimes tense, relationship since the mid-20th century, when India attained independence from the British and the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China. India was the first non-communist country in Asia to recognize the PRC in 1950. But India-China relations worsened in 1959, when India granted sanctuary to the Dalai Lama and allowed him to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile, in addition to housing thousands of Tibetan refugees.

Later, the two countries fought in the Sino-India war of 1962, which ended when China unilaterally declared a ceasefire in November of that year, and Chinese troops retreated to their pre-war position. Over the years, India has also opposed China’s arming and backing of nuclear-armed Pakistan, New Delhi’s biggest adversary.

In the past half-decade, under Modi’s reign, China-India relations have gone through ups and downs, although the two countries still maintain strong economic ties. (China is India’s biggest trading partner.) When Chinese troops intruded into areas traditionally patrolled by India along their disputed border, called the Line of Actual Control (LAC), a melee broke out between the two sides in the Galwan Valley in June 2020, resulting in the deaths of more than 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese troops.

The Chinese justified their actions by saying they oppose Indian infrastructure projects on their side of the Galwan bend; while the Indians claimed that the bridge they had built was over seven kilometers away from the LAC, well under their designated area.

The clash came at the height of the COVID pandemic, and, when the Chinese intrusion took place, mainstream Indian news media, which typically targets Pakistan as Delhi’s greatest threat, stoked public opinion against another enemy: China. News anchors regularly referred to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID19 as the “Wuhan virus,” despite the dismissal of the term by many medical experts as xenophobic. Within a week, the Indian government banned TikTok, calling the social media app a “threat to India's sovereignty and security.”

The Hindi film industry followed suit: Indian moviemakers promised to not distribute their films in the Chinese market. The same pattern was seen in Chinese media, with the nationalistic outlet Global Times leading the way.

In this context, the new deal, as well as Modi and Xi Jingping’s subsequent meeting at the BRICS summit in Russia, could radically change the dynamic between Asia’s two big superpowers.

Though India has experienced significant economic growth since Modi first came to power, its benefits have been unevenly distributed, and the country’s unemployment rate remains high. This means that if India wants to continue to prosper, it needs Chinese investment, according to Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University’s South Asian Studies department. Singh, who previously served in the Indian military for 20 years, said that growing pressure from India’s corporate giants, such as the Adani group, that want to hire Chinese workers and do more business with the country overall, could have contributed to the Modi-Xi détente.

So how does the U.S. figure into all this? "There is no danger in making too much of this week’s efforts by Modi and..Xi,” per an article published last week by the Atlantic Council. The author, the Council’s CEO, Frederick Kempe, argued that for decades, Washington has erroneously seen the rest of the world through “the prism of its own security ambitions” and that it’s crucial to understand India’s foreign policy on its own terms.

India is a member of both the Quad and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and of course, BRICS. That’s in line with the country’s historic position in the Cold War as well, when it opted to join the Non-Aligned Movement, a coalition of developing countries that didn’t want to “pick” either side between the capitalist U.S.-led bloc or the communist Soviet-led bloc.

At the time, India leaned more socialist and, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1971. “That’s the legacy of today; when Modi goes and embraces Putin, that’s anchored in the Soviet experience,” said Eric Olander, founder of The China Global-South Project, an initiative that documents China’s influence in the Global South. Though the closeness between Putin and Modi might make Washington nervous, given Putin and Xi’s public pronouncements of wanting to challenge Western hegemony and establish a multi-polar world order, it’s important to understand that India marches to its own drum.

“India is non-West and not anti-West,” said Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar at a conference earlier this year, adding that India’s relations with the West are getting “better by the day.”

At last’s week BRICS summit in Kazan, Putin unveiled Russia’s proposal for a BRICS payment system, BRICS Pay, as part of China and Russia’s larger efforts to de-dollarize their economies. India, however, doesn’t share exactly the same ambitions: for Modi, it’s not just a desire to target the U.S. dollar, but rather a desire for the Indian rupee to gain hegemony, according to Singh. “A BRICS currency would be yuan, not rupee. If it was the rupee, Indians would lap it up,” he added.

“As Americans we still believe in a simple good-versus-bad narrative, you’re either with us or you’re against us,” said Olander. “But India has a deep strain of strategic autonomy in its blood. I can never see an Indian leader fully aligning with any of the great major powers.”

The Modi-Xi rapprochement, says Singh, will raise questions in Washington about India’s political utility for U.S. grand strategy, which some U.S. sectors were already wondering about. They will ask, “Is India really the poster child, the bulwark against China the U.S. is looking for?” he said.

Or, as the Atlantic Council’s Kempe asserted, “[India] will be neither pro-American nor anti-Chinese. It will act according to how it calculates its own national interests.”

Top photo credit: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China's President Xi Jinping attend the BRICS summit meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, July 27, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
Asia-Pacific
UNRWA
Top image credit: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock.com

Israel bans the last lifeline of aid to Palestinians

QiOSK

On Monday Israel’s parliamentary body known as the Knesset passed two laws banning the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) from operating in Israel, and in regions under Israel’s control.

This comes months after Israel claimed that members of UNRWA were either in Hamas or had Hamas connections, even asserting that some participated in the Oct. 7 attacks of last year. An independent review found that claims of widespread Hamas infiltration had no basis, but that some members did hold sympathies for Hamas, even as the organization pushed heavily for neutrality. These claims led the United States and other donor countries to pause funding to the organization back in January of 2024. Some of those countries have since reinstated funding.

keep readingShow less
The tightening Pacific web: A move toward Asian NATO?

Roman_Studio/Shutterstock

The tightening Pacific web: A move toward Asian NATO?

Asia-Pacific

The United States is undertaking a major effort to reinforce the imperial model that it has used to dominate Asia and the Pacific since the end of World War II.

Focusing on its hub-and-spoke model, which it has used to keep itself positioned as the dominant hub of the Pacific, the United States is engaging in simultaneous efforts to facilitate cooperation among its spokes, particularly its allies and partners. U.S. officials are seeking greater multilateral coordination with the spokes, primarily by strengthening regional groupings such as the Quad and fortifying regional alliances such as its trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea.

keep readingShow less
How the Cuba lobby lost its juice
Top Photo: Cuban exiles in Miami's Little Havana, July 2021. (Shutterstock/Fernando Medina)

How the Cuba lobby lost its juice

Latin America

From the early 1980s until President Barack Obama announced his intention to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations ten years ago on December 17, 2014, Cuban American voters in South Florida held a virtual veto over U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Well organized and amply funded, the Cuba lobby could deliver a significant bloc of voters in a strategic swing state, voters who would cast their ballots for or against a candidate based on their position on Cuba. Presidential candidates of both parties felt compelled to seek their support—or at least avoid antagonizing them. That leverage, however, is waning.

keep readingShow less

Election 2024

Latest

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.