A relationship frozen after a deadly clash high in the Himalayas five years ago appears to be thawing under the heat of US President Donald Trump’s economic pressure.
For the first time since 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to China this week to attend a summit hosted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a visit that comes as New Delhi remains in a tense standoff with the White House over its threat of 50% tariffs.
In a moment of geopolitical whiplash, the two leaders – whose soldiers fought a brutal hand-to-hand combat with fists, rocks and clubs at their disputed border in 2020 – could now shake hands, prioritizing economic stability over entrenched rivalry.
Alongside Modi, world leaders from Russia, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia will join Xi this weekend for what Beijing has said will be the largest summit yet of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Moscow and Beijing-founded regional security club aimed at reshaping the global balance of power.
India’s presence at the event is the most telling example yet of the warming ties between the two Asian powers – a budding realignment that threatens to undo years-long US efforts to cultivate New Delhi as a counterweight against a rising and increasingly assertive China.
While a thaw in India and China’s fractious relationship was already underway, analysts say Trump’s “America First” policies are making the two leaders, who have built their political brands on a strong foundation of nationalism, explore a partnership of necessity.
Trump’s threat of tariffs over India’s purchases of Russian oil have been especially hard to swallow for Modi, who enjoyed a budding bromance with Trump during the US president’s first term.
The threatened levies have “infused a certain amount of urgency” in New Delhi’s pivot toward stabilizing its relationship with Beijing, said Manoj Kewalramani, who heads Indo-Pacific studies at the Takshashila Institution research center in the Indian city of Bengaluru. However he said it wasn’t the “primary driver” for reset, with both India and China looking to stabilize their relationship for their own national interests.
Successive White House administrations have worked to boost strategic ties with India through technology transfers and joint military drills, working with the world’s largest democracy to counter an increasingly assertive China in the Indo-Pacific region.
Losing India would be “the worst outcome” for the US, analysts have said.
Following a meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Prime Minister Modi in New Delhi last week, both sides recognized the recent improvements in their strained relationship.
“India-China relations have made steady progress guided by respect for each other’s interests and sensitivities,” the Indian leader said. “Stable, predictable, constructive ties between India and China will contribute significantly to regional as well as global peace and prosperity.”
The view from Beijing, according to Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, is that “this detente was definitely started by Trump.”
“India is no longer able to pretend that it still has strong support from (Washington),” Sun said. Therefore, Beijing’s view is that because the US has “dialed back”India has to “recalibrate its foreign policy and improve its relationship with China.”
But analysts say the summit is unlikely to usher in a fundamental realignment.
“To me, it’s not a reset in the sense that India is saying ‘we are done with America.’ That’s not going to happen,” said Kewalramani.
“The United States remains (India’s) most important partner in the world, but China is our largest neighbor,” Kewalramani said. “We have to live with it.”
The trajectory of India-China relations has evolved from one of post-colonial brotherhood to modern-day strategic rivalry.
India was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1950, with that decade characterized by a shared vision of Asian solidarity. That nascent friendship was, however, shattered by the 1962 Sino-Indian War, a brief but brutal conflict that established a legacy of deep mistrust and an unresolved border dispute that remains the relationship’s festering wound.
In the decades that followed, the countries’ leaders took steps to build economic ties that saw bilateral trade grow, despite ongoing tensions at their shared border. But the deadly 2020 Galwan Valley clashes – which left at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers dead – violently upended this balance.
“The 2020 clashes are not simply something India can put behind it,” said Farwa Aamer, director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Instead, the aim here is to ensure no such episodes repeat, and that is where rebuilding the relationship rests on reaching a joint understanding on border stability.”
There has been a gradual normalization of ties between India and China after Modi and Xi met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia last October. The two sides agreed to restart direct flights cancelled 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 both started re-issuing tourist visas for each other’s citizens.
India’s recalibration of ties with China is a textbook application of its policy of strategic autonomy, which prioritizes national interests over rigid bloc allegiance.
At the SCO summit, as well as China’s Xi, Modi will be in the presence of the prime minister of traditional adversary Pakistan, with whom India recently engaged in a deadly conflict, as well as traditional partner Russia, whose continued oil sales to India since its invasion of Ukraine have irked the US and pushed Trump to slap 25% tariffs on Indian goods as punishment.
This engagement with a China-dominated bloc stands in stark contrast to India’s deepening ties with the Quad – a security grouping with the US, Japan, and Australia – that is widely seen as a democratic counterweight to China’s growing influence in the Indian Ocean.
With their border dispute locked in a stalemate, India is choosing to insulate its diplomatic and economic imperatives from the security conflict with China, according to Kewalramani from the Takshashila Institution.
“While both sides know there are structural challenges and this relationship will remain difficult, both sides realize that a deterioration to the extent that it happened is in neither’s interest,” he said.
India’s strategic recalibration toward China is rooted less in a softening security posture and more in economic necessity.
Last year, China was India’s second-largest trading partner after the US, with bilateral trade reaching $118 billion, according to data from India’s department of commerce. India depends on China not just for finished goods like electronics, but for the essential intermediate products and raw materials that fuel its own industries.
Yet, this economic entanglement exists under the shadow of a tense military reality.
Any talks between Modi and Xi would be complicated by the tens of thousands of troops still deployed at their disputed Himalayan border and this unresolved conflict remains the primary barrier to rebuilding confidence. Last week, the two sides agreed to 10 points of consensus on their border issue, including maintaining “peace and tranquility,” according to a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow in the Center for Asia Policy Studies in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, notes, it’s “not clear that either side will really trust each other.”
The major test, she said, is whether the rhetoric from the two leaders translates to de-escalation on the ground, 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 Asia Society’s Aamer, will bring “perhaps a more stable relationship, where competition isn’t necessarily over, but conflict is at bay.”
CNN’s Simone McCarthy contributed reporting