Flashpoints | Diplomacy | South Asia

India’s ‘China Reset’ Has No Answer to AVIC’s Pakistan Admission

New Delhi has hedged more toward China without articulating any conditions. Beijing is taking full advantage.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (left) met China’s President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the SCO Summit in Tianjin, China, Aug. 31, 2025.

The Modi government has built its foreign policy around the claim that India has graduated from hedging to civilizational confidence. Its deepening rapprochement with Beijing since Donald Trump’s return to the White House suggests the opposite. New Delhi has hedged more toward China without articulating any condition under which it would hedge back. Beijing noticed, as is clear from a recent revelation.

On May 8, China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired interviews with two engineers from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), confirming for the first time that Chinese technical personnel were physically present at Pakistani operational bases during the four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May 2025. Zhang Heng described the experience of working in 50-degree heat as fighter jets took off and air-raid sirens wailed. Xu Da spoke of the J-10CE as “a child we had nurtured, cared for, and finally handed over to the user,” adding that its combat performance (including the reported downing of at least one Indian Rafale) “didn’t feel sudden at all.”

The confession lands at an awkward moment for New Delhi. For 18 months, India’s foreign policy establishment has presented a rapprochement with China as the centerpiece of strategic recalibration in a Trump-era world. The choreography is by now familiar: the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in Kazan, the Line of Actual Control (LAC) patrolling agreements at Depsang and Demchok, Modi’s August 2025 visit to Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s reciprocal trip to Delhi, the resumed Kolkata-Guangzhou direct flight in October. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar called the trajectory positive. Xi Jinping invoked the vision of a “dragon-election tango,” while Modi said Sino-Indian differences were “as natural as in a family.”

What no one in this process has been willing to say out loud is what India actually wants from China – or what New Delhi will do if it does not get it.

The pivot to Beijing was not driven by any structural shift in the bilateral relationship. Chinese troops remain forward-deployed along the LAC, and infrastructure construction near the disputed border continues apace – for example, the Hotan-Shigatse railway is being extended toward the eastern sector. Instead, India’s change in China policy was a reaction to Trump’s tariffs and the quiet cancellation of the Quad summit Delhi was to host last November.........

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