India and China are often described as the two great civilisational powers of Asia, two of the world’s largest countries and increasingly important poles in a changing international order. All of this is true. Yet there is an important asymmetry in their relationship that is less often acknowledged: India and China do not attach the same strategic importance to each other.
For India, China is arguably one of the most consequential external relationship. It affects India’s security, its borders, its neighbourhood, its economic choices and its strategic partnerships. For China, India is undoubtedly important, but it is one among several major relationships competing for Beijing’s attention—above all the United States, Taiwan and the Western Pacific, Russia, Japan, Europe and Southeast Asia.
This is not a measure of relative importance or national worth. It is a consequence of geography and circumstance.
It also helps explain where the relationship stands today. The sharp deterioration following the 2020 Galwan border crisis has given way, since 2024, to a cautious effort at normalisation. Direct flights have resumed, visa procedures have been eased, the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage has resumed and several institutional and people-to-people exchanges are being restored. At the same time, the latest border consultations in August 2026 again underlined the importance of maintaining peace and tranquillity along the frontier. The continuing sensitivity of the border is a reminder that normalisation remains a work in progress.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether tensions can be reduced. It is whether India and China can construct a relationship in which competition remains intense without constantly spilling over into confrontation.
Neither China nor India can afford to have a permanently fractured and difficult relationship.
There is an important adjustment that Beijing needs to make. India is no longer a peripheral Asian power whose strategic choices can be influenced primarily through pressure. Its economic weight, military capabilities, geographic position, international partnerships and growing influence in the Global South make India’s rise a structural feature of the Asian order.
China does not have to welcome India’s rise. It does, however, have to accommodate it.
India, similarly, will have to accommodate China’s continuing weight. There is no realistic strategy for India’s future that begins with the assumption that China can somehow be contained, isolated or wished away.
The sensible objective is therefore not to resolve the rivalry, but to make it manageable.
One reason they increasingly misread each other is that India and China view each other through the prism of their relations with other countries.
Beijing often interprets India’s growing strategic relationship with the United States, Japan and Australia as part of an American effort to contain China. New Delhi, in turn, increasingly views China’s policies through the lens of the US-China strategic contest.
Both perspectives contain an element of truth. However, neither should become the organising principle of the bilateral relationship.
India’s relationship with the United States is driven primarily by India’s own interests. India’s strategic autonomy allows it to cooperate with Washington on technology, defence, maritime security and the Indo-Pacific without that cooperation being interpreted automatically as participation in an anti-China coalition.
However, India should not allow the strategic preferences of Washington to determine the limits of its engagement with Beijing. Strategic autonomy has meaning only if India can pursue both relationships according to its own interests.
The same principle should apply to China. Beijing’s concerns about American power are real, but India’s relationship with Washington cannot be reduced to an American strategy towards China.
It is significant that India and China themselves have recently affirmed that their relationship should not be viewed through a “third country lens”. The principle is worth taking seriously.
No discussion of India-China relations can ignore South Asia. But it is important not to put every country in the neighbourhood into the same analytical box.
Pakistan is different because the India-China-Pakistan triangle has a direct security dimension. China’s strategic relationship with Pakistan, its investments under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and its interests in the Arabian Sea inevitably enter India’s security calculations. For China, Pakistan is also a longstanding strategic partner and an important component of its regional policy.
Bangladesh presents a different set of questions. Its importance lies increasingly in trade, connectivity, the Bay of Bengal and the economic development of India’s Northeast. Nepal combines Himalayan security with extensive social, cultural and economic links with India, while its geography gives China significant strategic and economic interests of its own. Sri Lanka, too, illustrates the need for India and China to distinguish legitimate economic engagement from activities that could acquire strategic significance.
There is a harder truth here for both New Delhi and Beijing: influence is not entitlement.
India’s traditional influence in South Asia remains substantial, but countries will increasingly seek room for manoeuvre between India and China. Not every Chinese project in the neighbourhood is necessarily a strategic move against India, just as every Indian initiative in the region should not automatically be viewed in Beijing as part of a containment strategy.
A degree of mutual restraint would therefore serve both sides. Neither should seek exclusive spheres of influence. More importantly, neither should turn neighbours into instruments of their strategic competition.
The economic relationship presents another contradiction. India and China are deeply connected, yet their relationship is characterised by considerable imbalance and mistrust.
The scale of the relationship is substantial. Bilateral goods trade reached about $151 billion in 2025–26, but India’s trade deficit with China exceeded $112 billion. Indian imports from China include significant quantities of intermediate goods, components and machinery that feed into domestic production.
India cannot realistically decouple from China overnight. Nor should it seek to do so simply as a matter of political signalling. China’s position in global manufacturing and supply chains is too substantial, while India’s own economic transformation requires access to competitive inputs, technology and components.
But interdependence cannot mean dependence.
India is increasingly diversifying critical supply chains, strengthening domestic manufacturing, seeking greater access to the Chinese market and welcoming investment where it contributes to Indian capabilities without creating unacceptable strategic vulnerabilities.
China, meanwhile, should recognise that a large and growing Indian economy is not merely a market to be penetrated. It is an economic partner whose success will increasingly matter to Asia.
A more balanced economic relationship would serve both sides. India would become less vulnerable to disruption, while China would gain from deeper access to one of the world’s major growth markets.
People-to-people contact deserves similar attention. The deterioration in relations has sharply reduced opportunities for students, academics, journalists, businesspeople and tourists to engage with each other. When societies stop talking to each other, governments increasingly encounter one another through narrow strategic narratives. Restoring academic, cultural, business and tourism exchanges is therefore not merely a matter of goodwill. It can help close the growing gap in how the two societies perceive each other.
Indeed, the search for “trust” can sometimes obscure the more practical task of establishing rules of coexistence. The two countries have genuine differences over the border, the regional order, technology, economic security and their respective relationships with other powers. Those differences will not disappear, just by wishful thinking.
What can change is how they are managed. Peace and tranquillity along the border must remain the foundation. The latest round of India-China border talks in August 2026 again underlined that maintaining peace along the frontier is essential to the broader relationship.
At the same time, the two countries should preserve the limited but real areas where their interests overlap—from multilateral institutions and climate change to global economic governance and issues affecting the developing world.
Nor should competition itself be treated as illegitimate. India will compete with China in technology, connectivity, the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia and Africa. China will compete with India. That is normal behaviour between large powers.
The test of maturity is whether they can do so without making competition coercive.
India and China do not have to agree on Asia’s future. Nor are they likely to become strategic partners. What they need is a working relationship that allows each to pursue its interests without turning every disagreement into a confrontation.
India needs to recognise that China will remain a major global power and that its interests cannot simply be balanced away through external partnerships.
China needs to recognise that India’s rise is structural, not episodic, and that India cannot be expected to accept a subordinate strategic position in its own neighbourhood.
Both countries also need to accept that their neighbours will pursue their own interests. They should resist the temptation to view every relationship of the other as a hostile act. And they need to restore enough interaction between their societies to prevent strategic rivalry from becoming mutual estrangement.
