Normalization offers fresh start for China, India
Print Edition
China and India have normalized relations.
Following years of border tensions, the leadership of both countries successfully agreed to de-escalate the situation, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Kazan BRICS summit. Modi later wrote on X: “India-China relations are important for the people of our countries and for regional and global peace and stability. Mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual sensitivity will guide bilateral relations.”
The India-China relationship is one that, if utilized to its full potential, has huge significance for the global economy and prosperity. This, after all, concerns the two most populous countries in the world, with over 2.8 billion people. Long ago, both countries dominated the old-world economy, with India’s Mughal Empire accounting for 24 percent of global GDP at its peak in 1700 and China’s Qing Dynasty accounting for up to 30 percent in the same period.
Once again, the leadership of India is aspiring to drive economic development and establish itself as a modern industrialized country. India sees itself as a “rising power” in a multipolar geopolitical environment. However, New Delhi had come to believe that China’s existing success in global trade and manufacturing was suppressing its own progress, leading to protectionist policies and an orchestrated deterioration of ties with Beijing in favor of the United States. They assumed that greater alignment with the West would prove a lucrative choice in their attempt to lure manufacturing away from China.
However, such did not work out. First, the geopolitical environment has significantly changed, leading India to acknowledge that it cannot rely solely on its existing doctrine of strategic autonomy in global affairs. This doctrine continues to serve its national interests, particularly given the strain on its ties with Western countries. Second, even as India continues to promote its domestic industry, economic development is never a spontaneous process but an incremental one. China’s success stems from decades of building supply chains as a coordinated, integrated and efficient nexus, not from so-called “unfair practices,” as the West has misleadingly claimed.
To manufacture, you require infrastructure such as railways, roads and ports; energy to power your factories; access to resources for product creation; specialized expertise and knowledge to produce specific products and items; and finally, suppliers. In the end, a manufacturing supply chain consists of numerous layers that, when combined in a specific geographic location, enable the production of goods quickly, efficiently and economically. This cannot be replicated overnight. India, while building its industry, has realized the criticality of its reliance on China as a supplier.
In other words, India and China are economically integrated and interdependent.
(The author, a postgraduate student of Chinese studies at Oxford University, is an English analyst on international relations. The views are his own.)
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