China and India have sought in recent weeks to ease a tense military standoff along their mountainous frontier. The drawn-out standoff, triggered by China’s furtive encroachments on the icy borderlands of India’s Ladakh region in 2020, has fostered rival military buildups and intermittent clashes along the Himalayas.
An Oct. 23 meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a BRICS summit highlighted mutual interest in improving relations between the Asian giants. Indeed, an agreement was reached for reciprocal steps toward defusing the military standoff and ensuring peace along their disputed frontier, which is one of the world’s longest land borders.
But can a potential thaw in the icy hostility marking bilateral relations blunt the Sino-Indian strategic rivalry, which is defining Asian geopolitics?
The origins of the tensions go back to the early 1950s, when China imposed itself as India’s neighbor by occupying the then-autonomous Tibet, a large region that historically served as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian civilizations. That annexation led to China’s 1962 border war with India. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the two countries restored diplomatic ties, but, despite efforts to establish a modus vivendi, mutual suspicions and antagonisms never disappeared.
In recent years, India is tasting the bitter fruits of Modi’s initial efforts to appease China. The 2020 Chinese territorial encroachments caught India unawares at a time when the country was preoccupied with enforcing one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Modi came to office in 2014 as a foreign policy novice. He thought that, by resetting the relationship with Beijing, he could help weaken China’s strategic alliance with Pakistan. Pakistan, like China, is a revisionist state that lays claims to sizable swaths of Indian territory. But Pakistan also has employed cross-border terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy.
The China-Pakistan axis has long generated high security costs for India, including raising the specter of a two-front war. Through a “defensive wedge strategy,” in which the status quo power seeks to split a revisionist alliance so as to focus capabilities on the more threatening challenger, India has long sought — unsuccessfully — to break the Sino-Pakistan axis.
The first prime minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tried to win over Pakistan, famously going there by bus in 1999. Modi, by contrast, focused on befriending China after coming to power, including hosting Xi before any other world leader and opening up the Indian economy for Chinese businesses by delisting China as a “country of concern.”
But Modi’s peace overtures spectacularly backfired. Xi visited India in 2014 bearing an unusual gift — a deep Chinese military incursion into an Indian borderland. This was followed by a bigger Sino-Indian military confrontation in 2017 on the Doklam Plateau, located at the Bhutan-Tibet-India trijunction. And the 2020 Chinese encroachments occurred despite 18 meetings between Modi and Xi over the previous five years.
After taking India on a rollercoaster ride on China, Modi has been injecting greater realism into his policy, including prioritizing military modernization and bolstering border defenses.
As the military standoff has underscored, India, by locking horns with China despite the risk of a full-scale war, openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. In fact, Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed status quo on India as a fait accompli without inviting a robust military response.
The standoff has only highlighted Xi’s strategic shortsightedness in turning a once-conciliatory India into a foe that seems determined to forestall a Sinocentric Asia. With Xi accusing the U.S. of “containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us,” the last thing China needed to do was to make an enemy of its largest neighbor.
This is similar to how Xi’s muscular revisionism has impelled major shifts in the strategic postures of two other leading Indo-Pacific powers. Japan, by deciding to double its defense spending by 2027, is effectively abandoning its pacifist postwar security policy, and Australia has ended hedging by joining the U.S.-led, anti-China AUKUS alliance.
Today, the Sino-Indian efforts to reduce tensions and pull back forces massed along the common frontier are being driven by different geopolitical factors.
For India, one consideration is to gain greater maneuverability in foreign policy at a time when the once-blossoming strategic partnership with the U.S. has begun to fray, despite President Joe Biden acknowledging that this relationship is “among the most consequential in the world.”
China, for its part, is facing increasing Western pushback against its expansionism. With its economy already sputtering, China is running into long-term growth constraints, including a shrinking and rapidly aging population and slowing productivity increase. By contrast, India — which has one of the world’s most youthful populations with a median age of 28.4 — appears poised to reap a demographic dividend. While India’s economy remains smaller than China’s, it is now growing faster than any other important economy.
Whereas the People’s Liberation Army of China largely relies on conscripts who ostensibly “volunteer” for two years of service at age of 18, India’s all-volunteer military is considered the world’s most experienced force in hybrid mountain warfare. India’s military edge in the high-altitude Himalayan environment, however, could be blunted by China’s superior air power capabilities, including missile prowess.
Against this backdrop, Xi and Modi have sought to defuse the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. While deescalating tensions along the frontier makes eminent sense for both leaders, the Sino-Indian rivalry is unlikely to weaken. In fact, this rivalry promises to shape the Asian and global balance of power.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
