India and China are continuing their cautious attempt to repair relations after six years in which the Line of Actual Control (LAC) transformed from a manageable disagreement into one of Asia’s most dangerous military frontiers. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Beijing on 25 August for the 25th round of Special Representatives’ talks on the boundary question, agreeing to continue negotiations towards a “fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable” settlement and to preserve peace along the border. This follows the gradual reopening of practical links between the countries, including the resumption of border trade through Lipulekh after six years. Yet the thaw remains fragile: allegations of Chinese encroachment in Arunachal Pradesh have generated fresh political controversy inside India, while large military deployments and the unresolved boundary continue to produce distrust. The relationship therefore presents a more mature strategic question than whether India and China are friends or enemies. Can two rising powers accept permanent competition without allowing every competition to become a confrontation?
The first requirement is to abandon the idea that improved relations require trust. The 2020 Galwan clash, in which 20 Indian and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed, demonstrated how quickly ambiguity over an undemarcated frontier can become lethal. Trust once lost is difficult to reconstruct through summit statements. But international politics does not require states to trust one another before cooperating. India and China need institutions that make distrust manageable: agreed patrolling procedures, military hotlines, disengagement protocols and sufficiently precise understandings of where soldiers should operate. The purpose of border agreements is not to make either side believe the other has become benevolent. It is to reduce the number of circumstances in which one side must guess the other’s intentions while armed soldiers are standing metres apart.
This is an important distinction between trust and predictability. Trust assumes the other actor will behave well. Predictability merely means knowing how it is likely to behave and what procedures apply when disagreement occurs. Political institutions are often most valuable precisely where trust is absent. Contracts exist because commercial partners may disagree; constitutions constrain governments because political leaders cannot simply be assumed to exercise power wisely. Border mechanisms perform the same function internationally. India does not need to believe China will abandon territorial claims. It needs enough certainty that territorial disagreement does not repeatedly threaten war.
The economic relationship makes complete confrontation especially irrational. India and China remain deeply integrated commercially, but the relationship is highly asymmetric. Bilateral trade reached a record $155.6 billion in 2025, with India importing roughly $132 billion from China, producing an enormous Indian trade deficit. Much of what India imports is not simply consumer merchandise but intermediate goods, electronics components, machinery and industrial inputs used by Indian producers themselves. Cutting trade abruptly would therefore damage China, but it could also raise costs for Indian manufacturing. The sensible objective is not indiscriminate decoupling. It is reducing dependencies in sectors where Chinese control could become a strategic vulnerability while allowing mutually beneficial commerce elsewhere.
This is where the language of de-risking is more useful than economic nationalism. India should want more domestic production of semiconductors, electronics, pharmaceuticals inputs, critical minerals and other strategically important goods, but complete self-sufficiency would be enormously expensive. Strategic autonomy does not require producing every input domestically. It requires having enough substitutes that another government cannot threaten to withhold one essential component and thereby alter Indian policy. Dependence becomes dangerous when it is concentrated and irreplaceable, not merely because trade crosses a border.
China faces a similar calculation. A hostile India would strengthen the Quad, deepen military cooperation with the United States and Japan, expand Indian capabilities along the Himalayan frontier and increase pressure on China across the Indian Ocean. Beijing therefore has rational reasons to stabilise relations even without resolving the border. India does not need to become China’s partner for China to benefit from preventing India becoming a much more committed strategic balancer against it. This is why bilateral diplomacy should be understood partly as competitive restraint: each country moderates particular behaviours because the alternative could push the other into alignments more damaging to its interests.
India should exploit that incentive without becoming complacent. Improved diplomatic relations cannot substitute for military preparedness along the LAC. In fact, credible defence can make diplomacy easier because it reduces fear that compromise will be interpreted as weakness. The objective should be deterrence without theatrical escalation: infrastructure, surveillance, logistics and force readiness strong enough that China cannot expect easy gains, combined with political communication designed to prevent every patrol dispute becoming a nationalist test of resolve.
This is where public rhetoric matters. Territorial disputes create powerful domestic audience costs because governments fear being accused of surrendering national land. Once every kilometre becomes a measure of patriotism, negotiators lose room to make practical compromises. Yet a border settlement, if one ever emerges, will almost certainly require both governments to accept something less than their maximal historical claims. A political system incapable of compromise because compromise is automatically labelled betrayal can defend every claim rhetorically while remaining incapable of resolving any of them practically.
The deeper philosophical issue concerns what sovereignty actually requires. Sovereignty does not mean a state must prevail in every dispute. It means the political community possesses authority to decide which compromises advance its interests. A government that refuses a beneficial settlement solely because nationalist audiences would punish any concession is not demonstrating sovereignty; it is partly surrendering policy to the emotional constraints of domestic politics. Political maturity requires distinguishing between defending national interests and defending every inherited claim regardless of cost.
India should also resist interpreting better relations with China as evidence that its partnerships with the United States, Japan or Australia have become less necessary. The opposite may be true. India’s ability to negotiate with Beijing is strengthened by the fact that China knows India possesses other strategic relationships. At the same time, India’s ability to resist excessive American pressure is strengthened by maintaining functional relations with China, Russia, Europe and the Global South. Strategic autonomy works through diversified relationships, not diplomatic isolation.
This is also why India’s China policy should not be reduced to copying Washington’s. America views China primarily as a global peer competitor separated geographically by the Pacific. India shares a disputed 3,800-kilometre frontier with China and simultaneously trades heavily with it. India’s risk structure is therefore different. A deterioration in US-China relations may be costly for Washington; a deterioration in India-China relations can place soldiers directly opposite one another in the Himalayas. New Delhi needs a policy calibrated to Indian geography rather than imported from another country’s strategic competition.
The current thaw should therefore be welcomed without romanticising it. The August talks did not produce a final border settlement, and both governments remain strategic competitors. The achievement is more modest: they are rebuilding mechanisms through which competition can remain bounded. That may sound unimpressive compared with declarations of friendship, but stable rivalry is one of diplomacy’s most valuable outcomes.
India and China together contain almost three billion people. Neither will disappear, neither will accept permanent subordination to the other, and neither can realistically dominate Asia without generating balancing behaviour from everyone around it. The rational objective is therefore not eliminating rivalry but institutionalising it sufficiently that competition occurs through trade, technology, diplomacy and influence rather than soldiers discovering the limits of an ambiguous border through violence.
That may ultimately be the most realistic form of peace between great powers. Political maturity does not require countries to stop competing. It requires them to understand that the ability to prevent competition from becoming war is itself one of the highest forms of national power.
