Amid a downturn in India’s ties with the United States, relations with China are showing signs of improvement, according to Chinese media. Beijing has pledged to address New Delhi’s concerns over rare earths as the two neighbours continue to rebuild trust after a deadly border clash in 2020.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in New Delhi this week for the 24th round of border talks with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. He is also meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of Modi’s visit to China later this week to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.
“There has been an upward trend. Borders have been quiet. There has been peace and tranquillity,” Doval told Wang at the start of the talks. “Our bilateral engagements have been more substantial. The new environment that has been created has helped us in moving ahead in the various areas that we are working on.”
Wang, on his first trip to India in three years, said recent setbacks had not served the interests of the people of either country. He assured Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar that Beijing would address three Indian concerns – fertilisers, rare earths and tunnel boring machines.
China’s rare earth exports surged in June as Beijing cleared a backlog of licence applications, but shipments of rare earth magnets to India were still down 58 percent compared with January, Chinese customs data shows. India, despite holding the world’s fifth-largest rare earth reserves at an estimated 6.9 million metric tons, has no domestic magnet production capacity and remains heavily reliant on imports from China.
In talks with Jaishankar, Wang urged both sides to focus resources on “development and revitalisation”, stressing that China and India should treat each other as “partners and opportunities” and provide “much-needed certainty and stability” to the world.
The discussions covered a wide range of issues including trade, connectivity, border management, pilgrimages, river data sharing and people-to-people exchanges.
Wang’s visit marks a milestone in a relationship that had plunged to a historic low after the 2020 clash, but has gradually improved since last year, when both sides reached a new border patrol agreement and Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Brics summit in Russia – their first meeting since the incident.
The thaw in India-China ties coincides with rising friction between New Delhi and Washington. A long-awaited India-US trade deal has stalled, and Washington is set to impose a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods next week while cancelling a planned negotiating team visit. The White House has tied the penalties to India’s engagement with Russia, particularly its growing oil imports, even as it strengthens ties with Pakistan through a new tariff framework and deeper counter-terrorism cooperation.