The Pulse | Diplomacy | South Asia

Episodic Summitry Alone Cannot Reset India-China Relations

Agreements are reached to facilitate meetings between leaders ahead of multilateral summits, but often don’t move much beyond that.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands ahead of their meeting on the sidelines of the 18th BRICS Summit at New Delhi, India, Sept 12, 2026.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on September 12, on the sidelines of the 18th BRICS Summit hosted by India. This was Xi’s first visit to India in nearly seven years and his third meeting with Modi in under two years – all on the sidelines of multilateral meetings, including at Kazan in Russia and Tianjin in China.

Both the Indian and Chinese readouts from the New Delhi meeting sought to convey that relations, which had plunged to a low after the 2020 Galwan border clashes, were on an upswing. According to the Chinese readout, President Xi said that the progress made had not “come easily and needs to be cherished.” The Indian readout also “welcomed the steady progress” in bilateral ties since the leaders last met in Tianjin last year.

Indeed, over the past two years, relations have moved forward. The two countries have gradually advanced talks on boundary delimitations and paved the way for greater people-to-people exchanges, including through the resumption of direct flights. On the economic front, New Delhi has eased restrictions on the purchase of select Chinese equipment imports, while Beijing has agreed to ease restrictions on supplying fertilizers, rare earth minerals, etc., to India.

Notably, these breakthroughs in bilateral ties – especially on contentious border-related questions – came just before multilateral summits.

On September 8, 2022, after a prolonged military stalemate along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh, India and China agreed to disengage from the Gogra-Hot Springs area. Significantly, this breakthrough came just a week before the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Samarkand that both Xi and Modi were scheduled to attend.

Again, on October 21, 2024, India and China reached a landmark agreement on patrolling arrangements at two friction points, Depsang and Demchok, in eastern Ladakh. This came just two days before the 16th BRICS Summit at Kazan, where Modi and Xi held their first formal bilateral meeting on the margins of the summit.

More recently, just days before the 2026 SCO summit at Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where Modi and Xi were present, India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Beijing for the 25th round of talks between the Special Representatives of India and China on the Boundary Question. The two sides released an eight-point outcome reaffirming commitment to peace and tranquility in the border areas and announced new institutional arrangements to manage border frictions, including plans to establish two new border hotlines and two new points for meetings between army commanders.

However, when the........

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