Opinion | On India-China ties, Modi and Xi have the will. Do they have a way?

The two leaders have pressed ahead with their ‘informal summits’ despite little prospect of progress on long-standing trade and territorial disputes

Building confidence is the key, the thinking goes, even if it means sweeping some things under the carpet

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping in Mamallapuram on Friday. Photo: DPA

Published: 12:00pm, 18 Oct 2019Updated: 12:21pm, 18 Oct 2019

As the dust settles on the “informal summit” at the weekend between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping, attention turns from the impressive seaside optics created in Mamallapuram to the actual takeaways.

What did the two-day meeting on the seashore achieve? The verdict among India’s community of political strategists appears somewhat divided. Just as with the first informal summit at Wuhan in April last year, when Modi travelled to China barely eight months after one of the worst border crises in recent India-China history, the event near Chennai has been derided by some as all style and no substance.

It has been suggested that these summits – which come without the formal joint statements and agreements usually accompanying state visits – are merely an attempt to brush under the carpet the many very real problems between the neighbours. Kapil Sibal of India’s opposition Congress party, for instance, derided Modi and instead asked him to “show Xi his 56-inch chest” by telling the Chinese leader “to vacate 5,000km of land in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”.

Students sit in a formation that reads ‘Xi Jinping’ before the informal summit near Chennai. Photo: Reuters

India and China are, regardless, pushing ahead with this new mechanism of exchanges. Xi invited Modi to visit China in 2020 for a third summit that would hold added significance as the year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. The two leaders agreed an ambitious plan to mark the occasion by holding 70 events in India and China, with several high-level visits in the works.

One of the criticisms of the two informal summits has been that both sides have not made headway in resolving some of their key outstanding differences, from the unresolved boundary dispute on the Doklam plateau near the India-China-Bhutan tri-junction, to the trade deficit, and more recently, China’s increasingly apparent support for Pakistan over the Kashmir dispute.

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