Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s historic visit to China is a big pragmatic shift towards a nation it had been at loggerheads with a few months back. Days before the historic Xi-Modi meet, scheduled for 30 August, a new Bloomberg report suggests that Chinese President Xi Jinping had quietly reached out to India earlier this year through a secret letter addressed to President Droupadi Murmu.
Xi’s letter to Murmu that changed the tide
The letter reportedly expressed concern about any US deals that would harm China’s interests and Xi’s main purpose was ‘to test the waters on improving ties’, according to the Bloomberg report. The letter then went on to name a provincial official who would steer Beijing’s efforts. The message was then sent across to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Post Trump’s belligerence over India-Pakistan ceasefire and claims of US mediation in ending the war that Modi government seriously considered moving towards improving relations with China in May, the publication reported.
India-China renew ruptured ties with high-level meetings
Soon after Xi’s March outreach, Beijing issued a statement celebrating India–China ties, calling it a “dragon-elephant tango.” Top Chinese leaders, including Vice President Han Zheng, soon began echoing the phrase as a marker of renewed engagement.
National Security Adviser Ajit Doval then started driving the engagement as one of the few Indian officials they trusted. Doval has been serving as India’s special representative for border talks, and even travelled to China in both December 2024 and June 2025.
Later in July, after 5 years, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing. He urged China to avoid “restrictive trade measures and roadblocks”, referring to rare earth minerals, whereas China assured India of supplies during the meeting. Following this, there’s been a series of incremental steps to improve ties. Wang recently visited India and met Prime Minister Modi, post which his plans of visiting Beijing were made public.
US has forced India towards east to empower BRICS
The warming of India-China relations carries deep implications for the U.S., which for decades had courted New Delhi as a counter to Beijing. Trump disrupted that calculus by imposing 50% tariffs on Indian exports over its purchases of Russian oil, an abrupt move that jolted Modi’s government. Instead of pushing India to the brink, it may have empowered it to look east.
“India is now, according to the population, the largest country on earth, having outgrown China. If Trump continues with his tariff threats to India, who has a long historic relationship with Russia, you are playing with a very different adversary,” Wolff said while speaking to Russian journalist Rick Sanchez.. US Economist Richard Wolff told Russia Today’s Rick Sanchez
He later indicated that Trump has unknowingly empowered BRICS by penalising India – “Just like Russia found another place to sell after the sanctions by the West, India will also sell its exports no longer to the US, but to the Brics nations. Trump’s strategy risks making Brics larger, more integrated, and more successful as an economic alternative to the West,” Wolff said.
