On September 12, 2026, China’s President Xi Jinping came to India for the first time in seven years to attend the BRICS summit in New Delhi. The India-China relationship has changed quite dramatically since Xi’s last visit in 2019: the deadly Galwan Valley clash of 2020 and the subsequent years-long border standoff plunged the relationship to a frosty low, marked by visa restrictions and escalating economic retaliation. As the relationship inches its way to a thaw, the meeting between President Xi and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the BRICS summit offers a fresh opportunity to examine the trajectory of the relationship and where it may go next. On September 16, 2026, South Asian Voices spoke with journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar to help unpack the impetus behind recent India-China engagement and contextualize how it is being shaped and received on either side of the border. Aiyar is an award-winning columnist and author based in Beijing. Previously, she was the Indonesia correspondent for The Hindu, Europe correspondent for the Business Standard, and China bureau chief for The Hindu.

How would you characterize India-China relations at this moment in time leading up to this BRICS summit? How has perception of the other side shifted in each country? 

I think at this particular moment, the relationship is very calibrated, managed, and cautious. It’s certainly better than it was, say, five years ago, but probably a lot worse than 15 or 20 years ago. I lived in China between 2002 and 2009, and I think the perception of India at that time is dramatically different to what the general perception is in this moment.

At that time, there was still very much a sense of India and China in some ways being collegiate: These two large, Asian developing countries were grappling in similar yet different ways with modernity and trying to figure their way out in what could possibly be an Asian century, one that would see a certain amount of cooperation between the two countries. There used to be a lot of talk of hardware and software and India emerging as the back office of the world, while China was the workshop of the world. So, there was a sense of some kind of camaraderie. A fellow-developing country vibe.

I would say that has really disappeared. Today, there’s a much more negative perception of India in China, and it is really seen as a laggard in many ways. It’s seen as hubristic, somewhere to be put in its place, or at best, advised on what it should be doing. There are many reasons for this. I think one of the most obvious ones is just that the power differential between the two has grown so much in that interim, with GDP per capita being roughly five times more in China. So just as China has grown in its own sense of civilizational, economic strength, its sense of what its place in the world is, the feeling has grown that India tries to position itself alongside China, and is propped up unfairly, undeservedly, by the West in many ways. China sees India as having become a braggart of sorts that tries to punch above its weight.

Why, then, is China looking to engage India now, and how has this tactical reset of sorts been received in each country?

I think China sees this as a moment in which, perhaps because of what’s happening with President Trump and the kinds of pressures that he’s putting on India, it could be a moment where India can be dislodged from an anti-China camp. Beijing has very much seen things like the Quad as being a mechanism that’s working against China. And, so this, in some ways, is a moment in which it’s possible that India will finally see that its interests do not lie that way. India is also, obviously, a big market, and when it comes to the Chinese economy, they need places where their capacity can be absorbed.

The fact is, that ultimately, India is there. India and China share a boundary thousands of kilometers long. To have such a big power right there—whether it is reaching its potential or not, whether it’s going to be another China or not—the fact is that it’s a big economy and a populous country, and that it cannot be wished away. So, I think that there always has been that awareness in China, that India is a fact of life that they, at minimum, must have a managed relationship with. It does not help in any way to be in a very antagonistic posture. So, given the global situation where we don’t know what the future is going........

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