Officials say China’s foreign minister visited India on Friday, his first trip since a fatal conflict on the Asian powers’ disputed Himalayan frontier in 2020.
In June 2020, a high-altitude brawl killed 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese forces, resulting in a dramatic worsening in relations, with both sides deploying major reinforcements to the area.
Wang Yi was scheduled to meet Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar later on Friday in New Delhi after arriving from Afghanistan for the first time since the Taliban took power.
The two sides are scheduled to discuss border tensions as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Al Jazeera. Both countries consider Russia to be a friendly country and have rebuffed Western calls to denounce Moscow’s action, which it refers to as a special military operation.
Thousands of Indian troops remain stationed near India’s remote border with China in Ladakh’s Galwan region in the Himalayas, where hand-to-hand combat erupted in 2020, the first lethal clash between the nuclear-armed neighbors in decades.
Since a border conflict in 1962, their unmarked 3,500-kilometer boundary has remained generally calm, yet both countries still claim huge swaths of each other’s land.
Senior officers from the two forces have held more than a dozen rounds of talks to de-escalate the impasse in Ladakh since the Galwan clash, but progress has been slow.
Indian and Chinese forces concluded a pullback from a lake area in Ladakh last February after several military negotiations. Wang Yi and Jaishankar agreed to establish a hotline a few days later.
The border impasse does not represent the entirety of China-India ties, according to Beijing, while New Delhi maintains that calm along the border is necessary for the two countries to work together.
New Delhi, on the other hand, is concerned about China’s involvement in nearly all of India’s neighbors.
Apart from the Himalayan problems, India’s suspicion arises from Beijing’s support for Pakistan’s old nemesis, the fight for influence in Nepal, and concerns about China’s economic weight in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.
China is India’s most important commercial partner, with bilateral trade increasing at a breakneck pace since the turn of the century, reaching $95 billion in 2021-22.
The balance of trade remains strongly skewed in Beijing’s favor. India’s trade deficit with China is the highest of any country, and it has been gradually increasing.
In India, more than 100 Chinese companies operate, including state-owned industries and electronics manufacturers that have dominated the Indian mobile phone market.
New Delhi, on the other hand, has tightened the screws on Chinese players in Asia’s third-largest economy since 2020, tightening surveillance of investments and imports and prohibiting the use of several mobile apps.
The Indian government has previously blocked billions of dollars in Chinese investment, but last week said that approvals for 66 applications from neighboring nations, including China, totaling $1.79 billion had been granted.
India also prohibited access to dozens of Chinese apps last month due to security concerns, bringing the total number of restricted mobile apps to above 300.
