Chinese President Xi Jinping’s India visit for this year’s Brics summit over the weekend signals a positive turn in bilateral relations, foreign policy experts in India and China say.
Xi last visited New Delhi in 2014, and India for an informal summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019. After the Sino-Indian war of 1962, India-China relations hit a new low in 2020, when at least 24 Indian and Chinese soldiers were killed in melee clashes in the Galwan River valley. Xi did not attend the India-hosted G20 summit in 2023.
Bilateral relations have improved slowly since Modi and Xi met on the sidelines of the 16th Brics Summit in Russia a year later. Other than last year’s Brics summit in Brazil, Xi has attended all Brics summits, including a virtual one, since he became general secretary of the Communist Party of China in 2013.
Xi, who is reportedly travelling with a large delegation to India, is scheduled to meet Modi for bilateral talks on the sidelines of the 18th Brics Summit on Saturday.
“I expect they will try to signal some further progress,” Ashok Kantha, India’s ambassador to China from 2014-16, said, referring to the India-China special representatives’ talks on the border dispute between National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on August 25, when an eight-point joint statement towards pursuing a mutually acceptable solution in the future was issued.
Kantha said he also expects a review of the India-China strategic economic dialogue (SED), a bilateral mechanism for macroeconomic coordination held every two years between 2012 and 2019.
Bali Deepak, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said while the border settlement will take time, the SED should be revived so that bilateral engagement opens up.
“Translating the phased achievements, such as enhanced border control, the revival of border trade, and increased people-to-people exchanges into concrete implementation at an institutional level helps to prevent localised frictions from disrupting the overall trend of easing tensions, thereby injecting new momentum into the process of improving bilateral relations,” Qian Feng, director of research, National Strategy Institute, Tsinghua University, Beijing, said of a series of bilateral measures taken lately.
Chinese expectations from the 18th Brics Summit could include three major outcomes, going by his view.
The first is “the rollout of practical implementation guidelines for cross-border trade settlement in local currencies, thereby expanding the scope of non-US dollar payments within the Brics bloc and mitigating the risk of exchange-rate volatility among member states”; second, the finalisation of a new round of expansion plans for the New Development Bank (NDB), “providing green infrastructure financing support to an additional number of countries from the global south”; and third, “the issuance of a Brics position paper on security cooperation, which will establish a unified narrative among emerging economies on regional hotspot issues and strengthen Brics’ influence in global governance”.
India is likely to welcome the NDB expansion plan, owing to its own investment and engagement. In recent years, China and Russia have pushed for de-dollarisation within Brics, which India has resisted. One reason is that India does not want to hurt its relationship with the United States, and another is the fear of China controlling trade because the renminbi is considered the strongest currency in the bloc today. India has done rupee-rouble settlements with Russia for crude oil. But China’s geopolitical ambitions of someday overtaking the US with Russian backing are something that India does not want to be seen as being part of, despite India’s ongoing problems with the US, making the prospect of a security document unlikely.
Kantha said Brics is not a security platform. “We don’t want China and Russia to hijack it.”
But China will be supportive of India’s Brics hosting overall, he said.
Xi’s India visit will help his image during negotiations with US President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on September 24. Earlier this month, Xi visited Kyrgyzstan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and Egypt on the 70th anniversary of their bilateral diplomatic ties.
