By Srikanth Kondapalli

Post Doklam, India and China have been working to increase cooperation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding an informal summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Wuhan in April this year which has been subsequently followed by four more meetings in recent months. It had brought equilibrium in the bilateral relations. The second informal summit meeting between the two leaders is expected next year.

Since the “disengagement” of troops at Doklam in August 2017, and specifically after the Wuhan informal summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping, bilateral relations appear to be arriving at equilibrium. A series of high level visits, growing trade and investments, renewal of counter-terror joint operations between the two armies, and people-to-people exchanges are triggering renewed interest in the bilateral relations.

The Wuhan meeting resulted in an understanding between the two countries to increase “strategic communications”, de-escalate borders and provide “strategic guidance” to their respective armies to “manage” the situation on the borders, enhance confidence building measures (CBMs), cooperate in economic projects in war-torn Afghanistan, enhance economic relations by addressing trade deficits, While the emerging tariff wars between the United States and China in the past few months has forced China to mend fences with its neighbours, including with Japan and India, it needs to be seen whether this upgradation in relations is of medium term or short-term duration.

Relations with India as such have been upgraded. Firstly, are a series of high-level visits and initiatives. PM Modi met with President Xi at Xiamen at the BRICS meeting in September 2017 soon after the “disengagement of troops” at Doklam with the suggestion that a new set of more effective CBMs needs to be evolved. Later, both met four times this year – at the Wuhan meeting on April 27-28, 2018 for over ten hours resulted in a spate of understandings that became concrete at the Qingdao meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on June 9, 2018 when China agreed to import rice and share hydrological data on Brahmaputra river.

Another review meeting of the bilateral relations took place at the sidelines of the BRICS meeting at Johannesburg on July 26 which was termed as “very productive”. Modi suggested, after the meeting with Xi at the G-20 meeting in Argentina on November 30, that there is a “perceptible improvement” in the bilateral relations. Xi had agreed to import more rice and sugar from India. This was the 16 th meeting with Xi since PM Modi took charge in 2014, while his predecessor Manmohan Singh met China’s President 27 times in 10 years.

Another series of meetings were held at the defence, home and foreign ministerial levels. Coinciding with the Wuhan meeting, defence and foreign ministers of India, Nirmala Sitharaman and Sushma Swaraj visited Beijing. Sitaraman met her Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe earlier at Moscow. During her April 23-25 visit, Sitaraman suggested for strengthening military ties, including CBMs and joint counter-terrorism efforts. While military to military ties are expected to increase, and overall both countries prevented conflict, there does not seem to be trust building outcomes. Many activities in this sphere remain cosmetic in nature.

On her part, Swaraj, during her four day visit to China, emphasised on language learning, resolving issues on the borders, and trade deficits. Both also began training Afghan diplomats recently. China followed these visits by sending defence minister Wei Fenghe, public security minister Zhao Kezhi and foreign minister Wang Yi to India. Wei’s visit saw the decisions to re-commence the 7th round of “hand-in-hand” joint counter-terrorism operation (held between December 10-23), discussion relating to setting up a hotline between the military commands, and restructuring the MoU signed in May 2006 between the two defence ministries.

Zhao’s visit to Delhi saw an agreement signed with Home Minister Rajnath Singh on October 23 on law enforcement and security. Since both countries have identified terrorism as the primary national security threat, this agreement provides an institutional mechanism to resolve differences, especially given China’s intransigence at taking a position at the United Nations 1267 counter-terrorism committee on Pakistan-based terrorists namely Masood
Azhar, Zakir-ul-Rahman and others.

Foreign minister Wang Yi visited Delhi on December 21-24 signing the high-level mechanism on people to people contacts and cultural exchanges in about 10 fields including sports, films and TV, museum administration, youth exchanges, language teaching and others. While the Swaraj reiterated some of the “hard” issues affecting the bilateral relations, viz., territorial dispute resolution, trade deficits, etc, Wang suggested to resolving the bilateral relations through “soft” approaches.

China appears to be applying a Lao Zi’s maxim for its relations with India, that “Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield…what is soft is strong”. On the economic front, the “developmental partnership” that both countries evolved since last five years, saw incremental progress. The August 1-2 Indian trade delegation visit was followed by a pharmaceutical delegation on August 21-22 to China to lay the ground for exports to China. Trade deficits issues have been raised by the Indian side since President Patil’s visit to China in 2010 but to no avail.

The cumulative trade deficit in favour of China in the past decade stands around $626 billion. After Wuhan China suggested that it will import cancer curing drugs (about 29 of them) in addition to rice, sugar and other items. The Chinese movie “Dying to Survive” highlighted the travails of cancer patients in China. China had been blocking the inexpensive Indian generic drugs, despite rampant smuggling from India.

India had been insisting on market access, lifting of non-tariff barriers in the China market, investments from China and the like. While China’s investment in 2017 picked up to $2 billion – mainly in start-ups – cumulatively so far it is under $8 billion in India. Overall, while the bilateral relations are acquiring strategic dimensions, with “developmental partnership” is also making some headway. Post-Doklam period had brought equilibrium in the bilateral relations. The second informal summit meeting between the two leaders is expected next year and since both countries have a to-down approach in terms of decision-making process, this meeting is expected to further review and introduce new elements. It is clear that much of the above is coming in the wake of the emerging tariff wars between the United States and China. For this reason India needs to be on guard to see whether Beijing’s renewed focus on India is of short or for medium term.

(The author, Srikanth Kondapalli, is Professor in Chinese Studies at JNU, Delhi. Views are personal)