Cooperative Federalism Essential for India’s China Policy

Tensions in India-China relations as far as the boundary dispute is concerned are here to stay. However, there is the belief — at least on the Indian side — that the economic relationship can and needs to be promoted. If so, one major prong of this effort will be through engagements between India’s states and China’s provinces.

During his January visit to China, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri did not only meet the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) leadership, he also met with the head of the CPC’s International Department, Liu Jianchao. The latter holds no formal role in the Chinese State, but his department represents the Communist Party of China, including its provincial and other local-level officials, in their external relations.

The Misri-Liu meeting, therefore, offers an idea of how the two countries are thinking of promoting economic engagement at a time when India-China ties remain complicated by tensions on the boundary as well as those at the regional and global levels.

Reaching out to CPC

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A ‘Global Community’ with Chinese Characteristics

Originally published as, ‘Harmony means hierarchy: Lifting the veil on China’s global community rhetoric’, India’s World, Vol. 1, Issue 2, March-April 2025.

At the beginning of the year Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, inaugurated the Research Center on Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. This is not the first centre of its kind. In November 2019, another university in Beijing, announced the creation of the Institute for a Community with Shared Future and went on to set up a Pakistan Research Center for a Community with Shared Future in Islamabad the following year.

Despite these grand, altruistic titles, the Chinese Party-state’s regime interests and the worldview that flows from these interests do not allow for a conception of the kind of global community that Beijing claims to support. There are several reasons why this is so.

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Ishiba Meets Trump: A Diplomatic Win for Japan Under Pressure

Originally published as Chisako T. Masuo and Jabin T. Jacob, ‘Ishiba-Trump meet a diplomatic win for Japan’, Deccan Herald, 24 February 2025.

By mid-February, United States’ new president Donald Trump had invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House. The meeting with the Israeli leader was aimed at resolving the Gaza issue, which is a particularly emotive issue in the US currently. However, the visits of Ishiba and Modi are noteworthy because neither country is one that the mainstream American public has been known to care much about, and because from a larger diplomatic perspective, Europe seems to have been pointedly ignored.

The latter point has been driven home by the fact that the Americans and Russians have already met in Saudi Arabia to discuss the conflict in Ukraine leaving the Ukrainians themselves and the Europeans scrambling. Both Japan and India perhaps continue to be seen as useful in the US strategy of ensuring American supremacy by containing China’s global expansion. After all, it was the first Trump administration that provided fresh impetus to the QUAD initiative.

Reconnecting

Nevertheless, getting relations off to a good start with Trump was a major issue for the Japanese government, led by Ishiba who had just taken office in October but lost his party’s majority in snap elections that followed. Wishing to emulate the action of his former rival and late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2016, Ishiba expressed his desire to visit Trump soon after the US elections — a request the Trump team refused saying that he could not do so before the inauguration due to domestic regulations.

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Indian Foreign Secretary’s Visit to Beijing Underlines New Delhi’s Limited Options

Originally published as ‘Vikram Misri’s Beijing visit underlines India’s limited options’, Deccan Herald, 4 February 2025.

At the end of January, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visited China in the latest step in an unfolding thaw in the bilateral relationship. It should be clear, however, from the statements put out by each side on the meeting between Misri and Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong that the two countries appear to want different things and have different priorities.

Note, for instance, that the decision to resume the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra later this summer comes at the top of the Indian statement on the visit, but is only point number five in the Chinese statement.

Also at the top of the Indian statement was the agreement “to hold an early meeting of the India-China Expert Level Mechanism to discuss resumption of provision of hydrological data and other cooperation pertaining to trans-border rivers”. However, the Chinese reference to the issue is at the bottom of their statement at number six. This suggests that the Chinese intend to continue using their leverage as the upper riparian state to discomfit India. Stopping the sharing of river data with India in the first place was itself a breach of bilateral agreements, and there is really no guarantee that this blackmail will not continue.

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For China, Age is More than a Number

Originally published as ‘For China, Age is More than a Number’, India’s World, 9 December 2024.

On one of his state visits to Egypt in the 1990s, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin is said to have discovered that the Egyptians showcased their civilization as being 5,000 years old. On his return, he ordered that Chinese history – until then merely between 3,000 and 4,000 years old according to the prevailing record – claim similar antiquity with the Egyptians.

The story may be apocryphal, but tells us a great deal about how Beijing sees the world, and more importantly, how it sees its own place in it.

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Doval-Wang SR Talks: Back to the Grind

Originally published as, ‘Two steps forward, one step back’, The Indian Express, 21 December 2024. p.11. Published online as ‘On India-China ties, Delhi takes one step forward, two steps back’.

While Indian statements on the bilateral relationship with China are exercises in brevity, Chinese statements are more expansive by comparison. Taken together, however, they provide a picture of how the relationship is evaluated by each side. With the 23rd meeting of the Special Representatives (SRs) on the India-China boundary question concluding in Beijing earlier this week, bilateral exchanges at the highest levels might have gotten closer to regular service but the meeting also highlight continuing differences.

Comparing the six statements on SR meetings that have come out (three from each country) since the first ‘informal summit’ between Indian Prime Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Wuhan in 2018 – the 21st (in Chengdu, November 2018), the 22nd (in New Delhi, December 2019) and the latest one – it is evident that the Indian side has increasingly weak expectations of the relationship.

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New India-China Patrolling Agreement: More Questions from Kazan

Originally published as, ‘Path to normalisation of India-China ties not easy’, Deccan Herald, 26 October 2024.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held “their first proper bilateral meeting at delegation level in nearly five years” on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia.[1] Coming in the wake of an announcement earlier this week of a new patrolling agreement on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) “leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020”,[2] there was much expectation of more details following the meeting of the two leaders. 

The details that have become available subsequently – not always through official sources – however, also raise several questions and implications.

The ‘legacy disputes’

In response to a couple of questions in a briefing on 22 October, the day before the bilateral meeting, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri noted that “in the pending areas under discussion, patrolling and indeed grazing activities, wherever applicable, will revert to the situation as it obtained in 2020”.[3] In a press briefing following the meeting, he described the deal as “the disengagement and patrolling agreement” and in response to a specific question on Depsang and Demchok – the so-called “legacy disputes”, in the Western Sector – stated that “the agreement that has been arrived at essentially pertains to these areas”.[4]

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A Patrolling Agreement and Some Questions

Originally published as ‘An agreement, some questions’ The Indian Express, 23 October 2024. p.11. Published online as ‘India-China agreement is welcome — but we don’t know enough’.

Indian Foreign Secretary Vikrim Misri announced on Monday that India and China had reached “an agreement … on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control…leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen”  following Chinese transgressions “in these areas in 2020”.[1] The question that remains to be clarified is whether “disengagement” will cover all extent areas of dispute where patrolling has been blocked on both sides, including the so-called ‘legacy disputes’ in eastern Ladakh at Demchok and Depsang or only those areas that came into contention in 2020.

Both Misri and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar who spoke at an another event a few hours later[2] were reluctant to answer direct questions on these two areas repeatedly referring to 2020 as the year of consequence.

This reluctance might have several reasons.

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Xi Jinping’s civilizational claims: foreign policy strategy and domestic panacea

Communist Party of China (CPC) General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping started giving annual New Year’s messages in 2013. While these are not as substantial or long as his once-in-five years Party Congress report or any number of other speeches made in internal party forums, they are nevertheless important for what the Chinese leadership seeks to communicate to the general Chinese public as well as the international audience by way of assessments of the year past and of challenges and ambitions for the year ahead.

Right off the bat, in his address at the end of 2023, Xi is at pains to communicate the impression of progress saying, China has “continued to forge ahead with resolve and tenacity”. It is also important for him to underline that the progress has been in the face of “the test of winds and rains” to portray his leadership and that of the party as capable of leading China through these challenges. As the wont of any authoritarian political party or system, the Chinese leader also tries to ignore inconvenient facts and to shape the narrative by saying China had “a smooth transition” from Covid-19, ignoring both the sudden end of its zero-Covid policies brought about by popular unrest at the end of 2022 and the country’s subsequent economic travails.

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