In August 2024, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, noted that several countries in the world have difficult relations with China, but India has a ‘special China problem that is over and above the world’s general China problem’. The minister was alluding to the complexity of the China–India relationship, which over their long history of interaction and sporadic tension has been marked by simultaneous engagement and estrangement.
The announcement of a border agreement between China and India in October 2024 has helped to de-escalate tensions that followed skirmishes along their border in 2020. These skirmishes reinforced the tendency in the West and elsewhere to see the border issue as the core source of tension in the bilateral relationship. Yet the border dispute is merely a symptom of a much broader geopolitical rivalry between two civilizational states. As China and India become increasingly prominent geopolitical actors, with more tools and platforms to project power and interact with each other, their rise introduces new arenas of rivalry, from geo-economic competition to differing positions on global issues.
At the heart of both countries’ difficult relations are issues of sovereignty and status. China’s claim to Tibet and India’s claim to Kashmir are both intertwined with the two countries’ boundary dispute. For example, the question of the succession of the Dalai Lama – the 89-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader in exile who fled to India in 1959 following the Chinese annexation of Tibet a decade earlier – is a potential flashpoint in the near future.
Asymmetry of status – both material and perceptual – is a key theme of the relationship. The material imbalance between the two nations is well recognized – China’s economy is five times larger than that of India. Less apparent, however, is the perceptual asymmetry, in that China is unwilling to recognize India as a peer and an equal. Notably, this was true even when both countries’ economies were of a similar size. This perceptual asymmetry is a constant source of frustration for New Delhi. Moreover, it fuels the security dilemma between both countries, given Beijing’s tendency to view New Delhi’s actions through the prism of the China–US relationship. In doing so, China sees India as a pawn in the more consequential geopolitical rivalry between itself and the US.
Underlying these issues of status and sovereignty is the question of trust. Although official statements on both sides make frequent reference to the need for ‘mutual trust’, the bilateral relationship continues to suffer from an entrenched trust deficit.
The material imbalance between the two nations is well recognized – China’s economy is five times larger than that of India. Less apparent is the perceptual asymmetry, in that China is unwilling to recognize India as a peer and an equal.
At the same time, several areas of convergence between both countries tend to get overlooked in the West. These convergences include an inclination by both to adopt a transactional or value-neutral foreign policy. For instance, both countries take similar positions on maintaining relations with non-democratic or weakly democratic regimes. Matters of global governance also provide areas of convergence, ranging from adherence to the principle of non-intervention to common positions on freedom of navigation and the right to economic development taking precedence over climate concerns. These positions will limit the degree of India’s alignment with the West.
From an economic standpoint, Western policymakers sometimes advance a narrative in which India emerges as a beneficiary of efforts to de-risk or diversify global supply chains away from China. However, that narrative fails to account for the fact that India’s growing prominence in global supply chains is making it more, not less, dependent on China. Despite New Delhi’s efforts to limit Chinese access to strategically important sectors, China remains India’s leading trade partner and India is heavily dependent on Chinese suppliers in industries such as pharmaceuticals and renewable energy.
The West – in particular, the US, which has tended to see India as a bulwark against the rise of China – needs to understand the nature and limits of the China–India relationship in order to develop more realistic expectations of what New Delhi can deliver in the context of Washington’s own strategic competition with Beijing.
This research paper traces the trajectory and drivers of the China–India relationship and, in so doing, challenges misconceptions about that relationship. These range from a tendency to overly focus on the border dispute, to a lack of attention to areas of convergence between the two countries, and the US and its allies’ overly optimistic views of India as a potential counterweight to China.
