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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Should the US be worried? India’s Modi set for rare China trip after
Trump’s tariff sting
Analysis by Rhea Mogul, CNN
Updated:
1:04 AM EDT, Wed August 27, 2025
Source: CNN
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 after Trump imposed punishing from
India.
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 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 imposition of tariffs over India’s purchases of Russian oil
have been especially hard to swallow for Modi, who enjoyed with Trump
during the US president’s first term.
The threat of the levies “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 a
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”
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.”
From brotherhood to rivalry
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.
A balancing act
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.
The path to stability
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.”
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