India and China Should Admit Their Economies Are Intertwined
New Delhi can’t break free from Beijing until it enters the supply chains its neighbor currently dominates.
China and India agree to dial it down.
Photographer: Leon Sadiki/BloombergIndia’s national security advisor met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi for the first time since 2019 last month. This get-together was previously an annual affair; but it had not been held since Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed on the border in the summer of 2020. Its resumption is another indication that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping seem to have agreed, when they spoke on the sidelines of a BRICS summit in Russia in October, to dial things down a notch.
But not too much. The two armies remain entrenched on disputed mountain tops in the depths of a Himalayan winter. Nevertheless, by the standards of the past four years, this counts as a thaw. Such progress could not have been predicted even last year. The two countries had dug themselves into adversarial positions. The Chinese resented India’s increasing closeness to the US, and the Indians were furious that Beijing seemed to be determined to change the status quo on the border to its advantage.